Reading shelf
Bookshelf
The books I keep nearby, organized as a shelf of titles that open into longer reflections.
This page holds the working reading archive: the books and source material that keep reshaping how I think, grouped by the kinds of questions they sharpen. Grey cards stay visible on the shelf until the generic notes have been replaced with a real reflection.
Currently reading
Currently reading
The book that is open right now, not just nearby on the shelf.
Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One
Shelves
A working library of books worth returning to
Each title opens into its own reflection page, where the longer notes can grow over time.
Science Fiction
Speculation, scale, and future systems
The books here shape how I think about emergence, simulation, language, and the social consequences of intelligence.
Foundation
Foundation and Empire
Second Foundation
Foundation's Edge
Foundation and Earth
The Naked Sun
The Robots of Dawn
Electric Dreams
Minority Report
The Mountain in the Sea
The Languages of Pao
Tales of the Dying Earth
The Fifth Science
There Is No Antimemetics Division
Valuable Humans in Transit
Ra
Morphotrophic
The Unreasoning Mask
Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future
Last and First Men
Star Maker
Technical
Methods, systems, and practice
Forecasting, state legibility, writing craft, and the books that stay useful after the first read.
Forecasting: Principles and Practice
Zero to One
Seeing Like a State
On Writing
Nonfiction
Histories of tools and thought
Books that frame computing and augmentation as cultural systems, not just technical artifacts.
Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One
The Dream Machine
Tools for Thought
Fantasy
Worlds, alliances, and long arcs
This stretch is mostly Raymond E. Feist: political systems, loyalty, and the consequences of decisions that unfold over years.
Magician
Silverthorn
A Darkness at Sethanon
Shadow of a Dark Queen
Rise of a Merchant Prince
Rage of a Demon King
Shards of a Broken Crown
Talon of the Silver Hawk
King of Foxes
Exile's Return
Redwall
Inspiration library
Essays, papers, manuals, and source trails
The bookshelf holds books. The wider library holds the source material behind the way I think: systems essays, technical papers, tools-for-thought notes, manuals, and longer research trails. A meaningful share of my favorite readings begin as papers on arXiv, where early arguments, interface ideas, and research intuitions often show up before they have been compressed into summaries. Grey cards stay on the shelf until I have replaced the generic notes with a real reflection.
Systems
Systems, legibility, and sensemaking
The material that shaped how I think about emergence, coordination, structure, and the hidden behavior of organizations.
A Big Little Idea Called Legibility
A Brief Guide to Interactive Planning and Idealized Design
A Proposal for a Scenario Classification Framework
A system literacy manifesto
Analogy as the Core of Cognition
Answers Are Easy, Questions Are Hard
Bureaucracy & Organizational Politics
Chronicle of the Death of a Laboratory
Conway's law
Creating Learning Organizations
Dan Wang's 2019 Annual Letter
Dancing with Systems
Emergent Properties
Emergent Understanding - Learning without Teaching
How to Think: The Skill you were never taught
Integrating Systems Thinking and Design Thinking
Interaction Structures of the Universe
Interactive Planning
Knowledge in Pieces
Leading Ethically Through Foresight
Making Sense of Knowledge Intensive Processes
Nebulosity
Observe, Orient, Decide, Act (OODA) loop
PALETTE OF SYSTEMS THINKING TOOLS
Self-organization in Communicating Groups
SenseMaking
Simulation is not the answer
Stances trump systems
Systems Thinking Applied to Teaming
Systems Thinking: An Operational Perspective of the Universe
Technologically Coded Authority
The 8 metaphors of organization
The Architectural Relevance of Cybernetics
The Interface Theory of Perception
The Philosophy of Computer Science
Tools for Thought: The Concept of a Support System
AI & language
Language models, agent systems, and machine reasoning
Papers, essays, and references that changed how I think about intelligence, interaction, and model behavior. A large share of this shelf traces back to arXiv.
AI Agents That Matter
AI-Resilient Interfaces
Agent2Agent (A2A) Protocol
Agents
Approaches to Data Science and Machine Learning
Attention is all you need
Attention is not Explanation
arXiv
Building Effective Agents
Anthropic
Building Scalable, Explainable, and Adaptive NLP Models with Retrieval
Cognitive Architectures for Language Agents
arXiv
Constitutional AI: Harmlessness from AI Feedback
Context management with OpenAI
Developing a Computer Use Model
Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models
GraphRAG: Unlocking LLM discovery on narrative private data
Holistic Evaluation of Language Models
Is Attention Interpretable?
Language Models are Few-Shot Learners
Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought
MemGPT: Towards LLMs as Operating Systems
Microsoft GraphRAG Repository Review
Polysemanticity and Capacity in Neural Networks
Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks
Review of the OpenAI Agents SDK
Toy Models of Superposition
Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback
Transformer Inference Arithmetic
Understanding Generative AI-Assisted Data Analysis Workflows
Why language models hallucinate
Forecasting
Forecasting, logistics, and operational signal design
The supply-chain, demand-planning, and decision-support material that keeps showing up in practical systems work.
Advances in MRO planning and scheduling systems
EASA AI Roadmap: A human-centric approach to AI in aviation
How Demand Planning can Improve the Supply Chain
Impute
Long-term forecasting with machine learning models
Models and Modeling for Manpower Planning
Multiple-Output Modelling for Multi-Step-Ahead Time Series Forecasting
Netflix TechBlog: Data Science and the Art of Producing Entertainment at Netflix
Principles of Marketing: Forecasting
State-Space Representation
Sundial: A Family of Highly Capable Time Series Foundation Models
Tying Predictive Maintenance into Inventory Management
What Companies Do To Forecast Parts Demand
Why Forecasts Fail
Why You Shouldn't Use Moving Average in Aircraft Spare Parts Forecasting
Workforce Management AI Forecasting for Dummies
O'Reilly
O'Reilly titles and inspired technical reading
Architecture, machine learning, and software craft references in the wider archive.
Container Security
Fundamentals of Software Architecture
How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe
Human Problem Solving
Introductory Graph Theory
Machine Learning for High-Risk Applications
Software Architecture the Hard Way
The Hero with a Thousand Faces
Sales
Sales and growth craft
Books focused on practical sales leadership and execution discipline.
The Qualified Sales Leader
Leadership
Leadership lenses and perspective
Frames and models for how people, teams, and institutions make decisions.
Forms of Talk
Frame Analysis
The Contrarian's Guide to Leadership
The Whole Earth
John Markoff
What Computers Still Can't Do
Hobbies
Sailing, food, and card-play detours
Reading that keeps you connected to craft, play, and hands-on curiosity.
Advanced R
Hoyle's Encyclopedia of Card Games
Learning the Art of Sailing
The Complete Sailor
The Great Grilled Cheese
Tools
Tools for thought, notes, and knowledge systems
Reading on notebooks, shared context, memory systems, and the craft of keeping useful ideas alive.
A Home for Pino
A Personal Philosophy of Shared Knowledge
Creating Knowledge Objects
Do you use spatial organization?
Documentation as an Open Source Practice
Google is not enough
How to capture thoughts efficiently?
How to take smart notes
Knowledge Management—Emerging Perspectives
Open Tabs Are Cognitive Spaces
Reading Your Browser's History with SQLite
Reflections on 2020 as an independent researcher
Review: Slack
Scenius or Communal Genius
Strategically Ignorant
Technical Conversations
The Extended Mind
The Future of Browser History
The Morning Paper: Local-first software
What is a Dynabook?
Why books don't work
Stripe Press
Stripe Press writing
Stories, essays, and books from Stripe's publishing collection.
An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management
Get Together
High Growth Handbook
Poor Charlie's Almanack
The Art of Doing Science and Engineering
Working in Public
Design
Design, interfaces, and interaction structures
Sources that helped me think more clearly about interfaces, explanation, navigation, and the shape of participation.
5 Reasons for Scenario-Based Design
Choice Architecture
Journeys & Notes: Designing Social Computing for Non-Places
Notes on Notation
Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming
The Illustrated Transformer
Tools and Tasks in Sensemaking: A Visual Accessibility Perspective
Books & notebooks
Books, manuals, and notebook trails
Longer-form source material that sits outside the main bookshelf but still belongs in the wider reading archive.
3am Epiphany
Building Evolutionary Architectures
Career Therapy
Community and Privacy
Connected
Cool Tools: A Catalog of Possibilities
Crafting Interpreters
Decision Systems for Inventory Management and Production Planning
Dive Into Deep Learning
General System Theory
How Forests Think
Language and Thought in Action
Second Treatise of Government
Sensemaking: A Structure for an Intelligence Revolution
Systemantics
Tools for Thought
Unflattening
Strategy
Organizations, strategy, and operating design
Sources I keep around for thinking about institutions, go-to-market motion, community, and decision structures.
An Innovative Approach To Improving NDR
Community-qualified leads are the future of sales
Definite Optimism as Human Capital
How Quickly Should You Grow to Key ARR Milestones?
How to Fix a Broken Go-To-Market Motion Using a Steady-State Funnel
Independent Research
Painkillers vs. Vitamins
The Decomposition of Marketing
The Economics of Hierarchies and Polyarchies
The Organization of Delegated Expertise
You can't fix a CAC Payback period