Bookshelf

Here is a painfully pared down selection from my bookshelf that has served me well as an engineering leader.
"The first big part of your job as a manager is to ensure that your team knows what success looks like and cares about achieving it."
-Julie Zhuo
A great start for new or aspiring managers, trying to wrap their minds around the basics of the role.
"For engineering managers, challenges emerge unexpected from a hundred small decisions, with few rules and no promises."
-Will Larson
Required reading for managers of engineering leaders, and a great one for any engineering leader looking to broaden their perspective and impact.
"A common anti-pattern in architecture entails trying to design a generic architecture, one that supports all the architecture characteristics."
-Mark Richards
A great resource to ensure your team is asking all the right questions and prioritizing the most important qualities of the software they're building, with a cursory treatment of popular paradigms.
"A better understanding of how programming languages are built will make you a stronger software engineer [...]. You might even have fun."
-Robert Nystrom
A love letter to programming language design, delivered as a step-by-step guide to designing a grammar, implementing language features, and building a compilation pipeline and multiple runtimes from scratch in C.
"An artist is someone who takes you where you could never go alone."
-Jesse Schell
A perfect gateway to the practice of game design, which presents a delightful cross-section of universally valuable skills, namely psychology, empathy, storytelling, user experience, and empirical decision making.
"For the human makers of things, the incompletenesses and inconsistencies of our ideas become clear only during implementation."
-Frederick P. Brooks Jr.

Still one of the most thought-provoking resources for avoiding common planning pitfalls in software projects.
"The hard truth is, bad meetings almost always lead to bad decisions, which is the best recipe for mediocrity."
-Patrick Lencioni
What an absolute life-saver! It's a relatable walkthrough of the worst symptoms of bad meetings and how we end up there. It provides great recommendations for running shorter, more impactful, and more engaging meetings.
"Compassion is empathy plus action."
-Kim Scott
This one helped me stop treating being empathetic and challenging people as two separate modes I needed to choose from.
"Without the leaders building the tribe, a culture of mediocrity will prevail. Without an inspired tribe, leaders are impotent."
-Dave Logan, John King, Halee Fischer-Wright
This one taught me to pick up language cues that reveal the state of mind of teams, and how to adjust the environment and their outlook to get them out of their motivational rut.
"Fall in love with the problem, not with the solution."
-Marty Cagan
I used to think that treating what we were making as a product would ruin the creative magic and lead us astray. But with experience, I now see how, in the right hands, it can push us to better empathize with our audience, challenge our assumptions, and provide clearer direction.
"To be an effective writer, we need to remember that our readers experience the scarcity of time every bit as acutely as we do."
-Todd Rogers and Jessica Lasky-Fink
If, like me, you've ever turned a casual team Slack post into a confusing novella, take this book for a spin. It helps us be more deliberate about structure and focusing on critical content in our work writing.