The Reading List
Everything I return to. Across engineering, AI, markets, military strategy, and leadership. Not a complete bibliography — the signal layer only.
Engineering & Architecture
Designing Data-Intensive Applications
Martin Kleppmann
The bible for distributed systems engineers.
Clean Architecture
Robert C. Martin
Principles that outlast any framework.
The Pragmatic Programmer
Hunt & Thomas
Career-defining principles for any engineer.
Site Reliability Engineering
Google SRE Team
How to run systems at scale.
AI / LLMs
The Bitter Lesson
Rich Sutton
Scale beats inductive bias. Every time. Required reading.
Attention Is All You Need
Vaswani et al.
The transformer paper that changed everything.
Andrej Karpathy's Neural Networks: Zero to Hero
Andrej Karpathy
Best ground-up LLM explanation available.
AI Safety Fundamentals
BlueDot Impact
Understanding alignment before building AGI-adjacent systems.
Market Analysis & Trading
Market Wizards
Jack Schwager
Primary source on what separates elite traders from the rest.
Trading in the Zone
Mark Douglas
The psychology framework behind InDecision's discipline layer.
The Intelligent Investor
Benjamin Graham
Value principle foundation — still applies in crypto.
Cryptoassets
Burniske & Tatar
The original framework for crypto asset valuation.
Military Strategy & Doctrine
The Art of War
Sun Tzu
Not a metaphor — a systems framework. Read 5 times.
On War
Carl von Clausewitz
The definitive work on war as politics and uncertainty. *Coup d'œil* is real.
A Book of Five Rings
Miyamoto Musashi
The Way of Strategy applied at the individual level.
The OODA Loop
John Boyd
Observe. Orient. Decide. Act. The fastest loop wins. Applied everywhere.
Certain to Win
Chet Richards
Boyd's concepts applied to business strategy. Underrated.
Warfighting (MCDP 1)
USMC
Marine Corps doctrine on maneuver warfare. Free. Download it.
Leadership & Management
An Elegant Puzzle
Will Larson
Engineering management as systems thinking. Closest to how I actually operate.
The Manager's Path
Camille Fournier
From IC to CTO — every stage mapped.
Extreme Ownership
Willink & Babin
Navy SEAL leadership principles. Servant leadership + accountability.
Good Strategy / Bad Strategy
Richard Rumelt
Most 'strategies' are just goals. This book explains the difference.