These three books did the most to help me make progress in 2024

1. Nonfiction Alchemy [affiliate link] by Jordan Ring

I already finished a draft of my book before I read Nonfiction Alchemy, so I learned some of his lessons the hard way. The biggest change I made after reading it was to my title. I had been using a more literal “promise” based title, but wished it was pithier. His description of how he came up with his title and why helped me come up with Swimming in Tech Debt, which I think works a lot better. The subtitle will do the work of conveying my promise.

The new title is more visual and communicates my main metaphor of using your encounters with tech debt as a trigger to make progress—“swimming” rather than “drowning” in tech debt.

I wrote more about this in Titling a book and Book Title as Visual Metaphor.

2. A Philosophy of Software Design [affiliate link] by John Ousterhout

So many gems—it should be required reading in any CS program. Ousterhout’s target is complexity in software, which is very related to technical debt. My book is more about any code that resists change, which includes well-written, simple, easy to understand code that just can’t be changed in the way you need it to be. This book is about understanding the sources of complexity and fixing them.

3. Slow Productivity [affiliate link] by Cal Newport

This is Newport’s latest book in a continuing series about his approach to work and life. If you haven’t read Deep Work [affiliate link], I would start there and move onto Digital Minimalism [affiliate link]. This book shows how to make big things at a slow pace. I worked on my book in my marginal time: a hour or two a day. But writing hundreds of words a day, a thousand every week, builds up. There were edits, restarts, rewrites, etc. But the pace was sustainable, and I owe a lot of that strategy to this book. (Also see The Four Disciplines of Execution [affiliate link] — which is referenced in Deep Work)