This page is inspired by Patrick Collison’s digital bookshelf. Since I usually don’t get asked for book recommendations on Twitter like Patrick does, this is mainly an archive of books I’ve read for my own use. I own many more books than I have read and sometimes bounce around reading several simultaneously. The list below is a possibly incomplete excerpt of books I liked, organized by when I read them.
I read a lot online as well, and recently started sharing articles I thought were particularly great on Pocket.
2020
Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose
Sadly, I only became aware of this book when I heard about the death of Tony Hsieh, the author and long-time CEO of Zappos.
The book is a fascinating account of Tony’s unconventional life, his personal philosophy, and the Zappos culture. It also got me interested in positive psychology (again).
Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love
Inspired was my formal introduction to tech product management. Over the past few years, I had witnessed many of the pitfalls (and some of the good practices) described in the book from the perspective of a data scientist. Now I could finally put a name to them. Reading this book made me excited about the positive impact good product management can have. But it also made me aware of how much many efforts to build data products are still struggling in this area.
Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Loosing Your Humanity
Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World
The Great Nowitzki: Das außergewöhnliche Leben eines großen deutschen Sportlers
The Impossible Climb: Alex Honnold, El Capitan, and the Climbing Life
The Making of a Manager: What to Do When Everyone Looks to You
The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win
A novel about IT management, especially DevOps. For everyone working in IT, many stories will sound familiar. I listened to this as an audio book and found it very entertaining.
The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement
A novel about management, especially the Theory of Constraints. I read this after listening to The Phoenix Project which The Goal is the role model for. I found it equally entertaining and it reminded me how many innovations in IT / software management can be traced back to ideas in production management from the 1980s/90s.
Trustworthy Online Controlled Experiments: A Practical Guide to A/B Testing
The Why and How of A/B testing with many real-world examples from the authors' experience at Microsoft, Google, and LinkedIn. Addresses the business (metrics, experiment culture), engineering (components of an experiment platform, make or buy), and analysis (statistics behind A/B tests, common issues jeopardizing robustness) perspective.
Tuesdays with Morrie: An Old Man, a Young Man, and Life’s Greatest Lesson
A friend from university recommended this book to me during a hiking trip to the Allgäu Alps. I had heard of it before (it’s a very popular book), but had forgotten about it again. Well, not this time. The book is short and easy-to-read despite death being such a prominent motive. It inspired me to visit my grandpa to discuss some of the life questions covered in the book with him.