Inspiration

Read a few books, very well. On this page, I keep a list of the books that transformed my worldview and refer to when I feel stuck. I intend to keep it short.

Communication

Nonviolent Communication: A language of life – A different paradigm for approaching dialogue. I’m living by it every day.

Agile Conversations – Drawing from various schools of thought, it offers pragmatic solutions for improving conversations at work. All examples in the book are from the IT industry.

Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High – Completely changed how I manage conversations. It introduces a coherent model of handling difficult conversations.

Management

Workplace culture

The culture map – My first contact with the many differences between cultures and how these differences create misunderstanding in the workplace.

Practice

Become an Effective Software Engineering Manager – The first book on the topic that I’ve read. It’s packed with practical, actionable advice.

Software engineering

Mindset

Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change – “The key to XP is integrity, acting in harmony with my true values”. “Unleashing the potential of the human spirit will lead to a future for computing that we can’t yet imagine.”

Practice

Clean Code – This book has had the most impact on my code writing style. It’s packed with advice. Not all will stick, but it will increase awareness of how to write easy-to-understand code.

Easy living

Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals – Challenged most of my views on efficiency, getting things done, distraction, etc. See my review here.