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Too many books this year, but these stood out:

• the joy of abstraction by eugenia cheng, where oddly enough I've barely read 7 chapters and it's given me so much.
• write useful books by brad fitzpatrick. eminently practical, super short.
• seven sketches in compositionality, I've faked my way through 5 chapters, it is really fun and not too hard for me to get into.
• the secrets of consulting by gerald weinberg – hilarious and wise, it really helped me reframe what I'm actually providing as I get into advisory consulting.
• unmasking autism by devon price – amazing, deep and practical book about what it means to be autistic and how to overcome the trauma of living in a world where you don't fit.
• intelligent embedded systems by Louis Odette – this is a book you have to program, which I didn't, but it's absolutely wild. build a VM, then a forth, then a lisp, then a prolog, then an expert system, all for concrete embedded applications. all with source code in 300 pages.
• augmented lean by Natan Lindner (disclaimer, he's a friend and I consult for his company) about what digital technologies can bring to make manufacturing and supply chains more human and empower workers to have agency in an increasingly automated and monitored world.
• old but gold: SICP JS version, which gave a new perspective on a book that fundamentally shaped my life. I've written more about it at dev.to.
• hacking capitalism by kris nova – you really have to chew through it to extract what she wants to get at, and it could have used more editing, this has helped me understand a lot of things about operating in a capitalist world as a technologist. She also is building an amazing community around hachyderm.io which i recommend looking into.
• weinberg on writing by Gerald Weinberg – a zettelkasten approach to writing, which fits my brain very well, and explains the deep wisdom, erudition, and quirkiness of Weinberg's writing.
• old but gold: patterns of software by Richard Gabriel, which has to be one of my favorite books on software writing, and which I hadn't read in a decade
• old but gold: the plenitude by rich gold, which is just such an inspiring book about an artist turned technologist behind a lot of the fun stuff at Xerox PARC
• less life-changing but fun to work through: cloud native go about building “modern” software with go, with a lot of concrete takes and examples.