The reason I'm picky - and getting pickier - each year about what I read is that what I read is what's available to think.

I walk a fair amount: 10,000+ steps a day. If your goal is having more time to think, I recommend a 20-30 minute walk each day. And then there's the question of what to think about. For me, I either give my mind something to think about, or it picks something out of the Worry Stack. Iterating your Worry Stack regularly is important when done intentionally, but do it consistently and/or continuously and/or mindlessly, and you'll burn out on whatever's causing the worries. If you've got a job as a software engineering leader, that'll probably be the source of many of the worries on the stack, and a thing to guard against is hating/resenting "the job" through lack of discipline to control our thoughts.

So an antidote is to choose. Reading provides my conscious mind choices, and the subconscious better paths to influence the choice.

Attention, awareness of agency and the mechanics of the mind were primary themes again this year, as you'll see. Here are the best things I read in 2025:

Rao Reading Algorithm by Arun Rao

I've been thinking a lot about how the machinery of my systems & regular activities works, and also how complacency hinders it, and then finally what effortful outcomes look like. This might be it for reading: "...reading is practice directing attention, causing your awareness to curate what comes into that awareness, for a purpose... I’ve rewired my brain so reading to learn is highly pleasurable"

The essay also offers an answer to Why Read The Classics, via Jacques Barzun who lived to 104 and, if you follow just that Wikipedia link and the author's advice to build out your semantic tree of knowledge, offers at least an afternoon's worth of new nodes, "in order to live in a wider world".

The AI Reflex by Blake Graham

Another post about technique and foundational machinery. This time it's the toolset used while working. Work as in coding and writing.

Speaking of writing: One thing I realized this year is how many of us work as professional writers, or at least the core output at work is writing to persuade. Whether it's short form on Slack/Discord, responding to a customer email, or a longform doc describing a problem and remediation plan, or a well crafted series of prompts that causes code to be written or reviewed, writing well is the primary method we use to affect change and ultimately deliver value.

The author on why his git commit graph has trended up by an order of magnitude: "Yes, the models improved, but that is not why my commit graph changed. I built a reflex. I stopped deciding whether to use AI and started reaching for it the way I reach for a light switch. The better models enabled the transformation. The reflex made it automatic."

Cognitive load is what matters by Artem Zakirullin

A deep dive into developing architecture and writing code that's optimized for reasoning and comprehensibility.

One of the odd things about making software is how averse we are to admit when the software is getting too complex, because of what it implies: that you are struggling, that you can't handle the load, maybe not smart enough.

In most shops, the people who get things done couple raw horsepower with time in seat and good long term storage. I was blessed with really good recall . Especially when I try. So I can remember how the thing works, either because I wrote it myself or I spent an afternoon tracing through a callstack and developing a dependency hierarchy in my head.

But long term storage is not working memory. Even amongst those who can get in there and work the lines as they say in chess, there is a reluctance to do so unless/until absolutely needed. A piece that just missed this list is actually a comment on Reddit, and this quote: "Chess is a constant struggle between my desire not to lose and my desire not to think."

"Good engineering management" is a fad by Will Larson

Software engineering management is weird. By engineering management I - and I think most authors - mean any role, regardless of title (Director, etc) where you (a) have people who report to you (b) are not in the leadership room with the CEO (aka you're not an executive).

I've been focused on these roles for the last seven years of my career now, after a decade or so of working as an IC, an executive and a founder. Mid-level management roles are exciting, and also weird in a specific way: They're all similar, but also they're all different, and nobody tells you that, nor does anyone typically tell you exactly what's expected of you until it's too late.

When a peer or friend or mentee asks a question about performance reviews etc, I usually answer this: Engineering Leaders deliver the product roadmap (aka their squads/teams ship projects on time), maintain their systems (aka minimize bugs and user frustrations and don't get hacked) and develop their people (aka hire, fire and promote people). Very few do all three well. If you are doing all three well, you're probably getting at least a decent perf review.

During ZIRP, you could get away with doing two or even one of these well; while my favorite leaders to report to are good at all three, I've had quite a few peers who fit what the author calls "orchestrators". As he points out, the specific post-ZIRP expectations are different. And they always will be, as tides turn and conditions change and expectations for a startup shift.

As an industry, venture funded SaaS has just been through one of the most severe shifts I've ever seen in my career: From prioritizing topline growth at nearly all costs to prioritizing profitability at the expense of nearly all growth.

This is easily the most immediately useful piece on this list: a steal & adapt framework for guiding your own focus and skillbuilding.

a simple mechanistic theory of jhanas by Bayes

Most of these pieces are pure pleasure to reread and re-parse. I realized this year that I don't even know what the best things I read are until I reread them and process them in close contact with each other. So a primary reason I write and post the best things I read each year? It's to know what the best things I read are. See also this and also this for more on that topic.

Rereading this piece bummed me out at first, and it's because another year has gone by that I haven't progressed into the jhanas. I still can only do the first one, and even that only sometimes. I still think this is a fantastic guide to getting into the jhanas, and it's totally on me for not making the time to practice.

So why is this piece on here? Because it unlocked for me two things. One, a way of diagnosing negative feedback loops as they're beginning in my mind. And two, a mechanistic way of hacking my own pleasure system. That's all: just a simple mental model that the author presents that led to two big insights. The second of which was key to me for enabling action related to the next item on the list...

Viscerality by Simon Sarris and How to like everything more by Sasha Chapin and The Consolation Of Apricots by Diane Ackerman

A trio on cultivating pleasure.

Of all the things we learn from our parents and school in the primordial brain soup called "growing up", there's one that I think would have the maximum impact to humanity if introduced broardly: Liking things is a skill that can be built, emotionally reacting to art, circumstance and deliciousness can be cultivated and programmed, and you can "develop a crush on the creator".

Focusing attention and awareness on pleasure can also be a way to keep the Worry Stack at bay.

What To Do by Paul Graham

My eldest niece turned 21 this year, and is graduating college next year. Class of 26. Over Christmas I tried my best not to give unsolicited advice or ask too many questions like so what are you going to do next. Maybe the most curious reaction though is thinking about the world through a young person's eyes has inspired me to think about what my long trajectory looks like. This is a foolish statement, but here goes: Deep into my 40s, I feel youthful, and as though life will take many new interesting turns and possibilities.

One thing I've never been good at: Asking for advice. I feel as though I'm burdening the recipient with my own failure to comprehend. "Feel" is the right word there - my belly aches and I have a tinge of vertigo just sitting here thinking of asking someone for advice. But people really like being asked for advice! It's not a burden for them at all. Especially if they're given a moment to think. Being asked for advice gives the recipient free range to talk about themselves and share stories.

Anyway, when I'm lucky enough to be asked for advice by a young person, my go to is to ask "Have you read Paul Graham's essays yet?"

Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury

The story of a summer 100 years ago. Though I read several novels this year, this is the one that really moved and stuck with me. Fascinating as a comparison with today, a reminder of things that have changed and things that haven't. Beautiful for its deep sadness amid an underlying optimism. A reviewer on Good Reads has already said exactly what I want to say concisely: "I've never thought so much about my own mortality without running away from the subject in fear and forced-naivete. I've never felt more fulfilled by a reading experience on both an intellectual and spiritual level as I was with Dandelion Wine."

How The System Works by Charles C. Mann

The intro essay We Live Like Royalty and Don’t Know It offers a free preview to the one and only paywalled piece on my list. I fit squarely into the author's Most People These Days, as I understand only superficially what it takes to create civilization from scratch. One of the things I continuously wonder about - even working as I do so closely to real estate lending - is why real estate has become so expensive.

A lot of this I feel is my own ignorance: I failed at a goal. In 2009 when I moved to the Pacific Northwest, one of my intentions was to buy some land and build a cabin. One reason for doing that is the satisfaction of doing a thing like that. But the biggest aspect for me is that I primarily learn by doing. And by building a cabin from scratch, I supposed I would learn how all the things like power and water and sewage work, at least at the scale of one. 

Moving from purely building with bits into being able to reason about building with atoms too was a theme of 2025 for me, and while I'd like to explore 3D printing, I'm increasingly becoming interesting in ways that mechanical control flow and system orchestration can be handled with code.

Cities are routers in network society by Gordon Brander

A piece of writing usually makes my end of year list primarily because it either catalyzed a new way of looking at something, or because it provided a launching point for an order of magnitude or more of exploration.

This piece is very much in the latter camp. To start, any story whose timeline traces back to Westphalia has my attention. That's a tree I've been building for a while: Western Civ II, the last 500 years. And then references Stewart Brand and Marshall McLuhan. If you've never explored Brand or the Whole Earth Catalog, there's an afternoon of branch-building for you - one that'll probably include Amazoning a book that just missed this list, What The Dormouse Said by John Markoff.

Most of all, I've always loved cities. I live in a West Coast city at a time when a lot of my friends and family, having long abandoned city life for the peace of the suburbs, wonder what's wrong with me. They appreciate aspects of cities - especially the job opportunities - but they like to keep the mess at arms length. A lot of that has been by design, sadly.

Long explorations of interesting subjects is another way of avoiding spending time on the Worry Stack. I'll close with a partial list of a few branches from this piece that turned into hours of exploration:

• Dark Factories
• The intersection of bits (which I've spent my career manipulating) and atoms (kind of like the dark side of the moon to me, a fascination)
• Jugaad and really this whole paragraph: "AI and automation increasingly absorb the scalable aspects of production. That leaves us to putty over the cracks. “Work” takes on a DIY/jugaad quality, focused on creatively hacking together powerful resources to solve contextual problems." - which actually describes what I'm really good at really well.
• “The line is blurring between remote workers and tourists,” - I was doing this in 2004. I had a laptop and I would fly to San Francisco on a Thursday night, by myself, and instead of taking time off I would work from coffee shops. People thought I was crazy.
• https://ephemerisle.org/index.php/Ephemerisle & https://www.mars.college/

That's it, the best things I read in 2025. Tempting to include a list of pieces that just missed the list, but I'm going to resist that. Besides, your LLM of choice can probably generate a great related list if you liked any of these. Find previous years here. Happy 2026!