Like a College Course: It Starts with a Reading List

Next month, I’m starting a new job.

It’s going to be a lot of work, both intellectually and slog-i-ly. It’ll be cranking out code, it’ll be architecting web applications, but it’ll also have many elements of product design and company-building. Pretty square all around, but I am restless with excitement. There are parts I’m confident I can tackle, and there are parts that I feel thoroughly incompetent to handle. So I’ve been putting together a reading list. Coding Horror has been an inspiration, but also, I’ve been grabbing pretty much anything people recommend.

The idea is to guilt myself into working my way through this list by posting it publicly. Also, maybe it’ll start a discussion with likeminded people? Maybe I’ll share some things I’ve learned?

Here goes:

• The Hard Thing About Hard Things
• The Design of Everyday Things
• Domain-Driven Design
• Capital in the Twenty-First Century
• The People’s Platform
• Change by Design

And so there you go. Business management, software design, product design, neo-marxism, and industrial design. Cause why not be eclectic?