📚 Books I recommend
Every book here I've actually read. Short on hype, long on usefulness.
Leadership
An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management
by Will Larson
The most useful book I've read as CTO. Practical tools for leading engineering teams — from small groups to scaling up. The insight on stacking small wins over chasing silver bullets stuck with me.
Will Larson's An Elegant Puzzle is the most practically useful book I've read since becoming CTO. It's not theory — it's a field guide from someone who's actually managed engineering teams through growth and chaos.
The book walks through the full landscape of engineering management: how to structure teams, how to think about technical debt, how to hire, how to set direction, and how to avoid the traps that take down good leaders.
AI
You Look Like a Thing and I Love You
by Janelle Shane
A delightfully weird and honest introduction to how AI actually works — written with humour, zero jargon, and a lot of examples that will make you laugh and think at the same time.
If you want to understand AI without wading through technical papers or breathless hype, You Look Like a Thing and I Love You is the book. Janelle Shane is a research scientist who explains AI through its failures — which turns out to be the most illuminating way to understand it.
The title comes from an actual AI-generated pickup line — and that's the tone of the whole book. Shane shows you what AI can and can't do by showing you where it goes spectacularly wrong.
Technology
Kvinde Kend Din Kode — a coding book written for women who are starting from zero
by Sine Zambach
A Danish book that teaches coding, web development, and app creation to complete beginners — written specifically for women entering tech. Accessible, practical, and honest about the challenges.
Most coding books assume you already know you belong in tech. Kvinde Kend Din Kode ("Woman Know Your Code") starts somewhere different — with the acknowledgment that a lot of women don't feel like they do, and that this is a problem worth addressing directly.
Sine Zambach is a web developer and blogger who writes in a way that makes technical concepts feel genuinely approachable. This is not a simplified book that talks down to you. It's a book that respects the reader's intelligence while removing the gatekeeping language that makes most programming resources feel like they were written for someone else.