Reading list resources:

• www.doradolist.com
• reddit r/eebooks
• https://standardebooks.org

Science Fiction

• Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson.
• Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand.
• The Martian - Andy Weir
• The Expanse (series) - James S. A. Corey
• Children of Time - Adrian Tchaikovsky
• We Who Are about To... - Joanna Russ
• The Body Snatchers - Jack Finney

Fiction

• Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy
• The Count of Mounte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

Nonfiction

• Too Much Money How Wealth Disparities Are Unbalancing Aotearoa New Zealand
• Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed
• Show Stopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft

Digital Circuits

• Digital Integrated Circuits - Jan M. Rabaey et al.

Electronics

• The Art of Electronics - Paul Horowitz et al.
• Fundamentals of Microelectronics - Behzad Razavi.
• Introduction to Circuit Synthesis and Design - Gabor C Temes et al.
• Digital Computer Electronics - Albert Paul Malvino

Computer Systems

• The Unix Haters Handbook - Simson Garfinkel
• Computer System a Programmer's Approach - Bryant O'Hallaron
• The UNIX programming environment - Brian K. & Rob Pike
• C Interfaces and Implementations - David Hanson
• Working Effectively with Legacy Code - Michael C. Feathers
• Understanding The Digital World - Brian Kerninghan
• Coders at work - Peter Seibel

Programming Languages

• Modern C - Jens Gustedt
• SEI CERT C Coding Standard by Carnegie Mellon University's Confluence.
• Embedded Systems with ARM Cortex-M Microcontrollers in Assembly Language and C.
• C Interfaces and Implementations: Techniques for Creating Reusable Software.
• Fluent C: Principles, Practices, and Patterns
• Secure Coding in C and C++ (SEI Series in Software Engineering (Paperback))
• Seven Languages in Seven Weeks - Bruce A. Tate

C

• https://www.dependablec.org/
• https://www.quelsolaar.com/Why_is_C_the_safest_language.pdf

Security

• Practical Malware Analysis

History

• Sapiens, a brief history of human kind - Yuval Noah Harari
• Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy

Design

• Notes On The Synthesis of Form - Christopher Alexander

Learning

• Get Better at Anything, Scott Young

Mathematics

• Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid - Douglas Hofstadter
• Lockhart, Paul - Measurement

Philosophy

• The Parallax View - Slavoj Zizek
• On Bullshit Harry G. Frankfurt

Management

• Radical Candor - Kim Scott
• Powerful (Intl): Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility

Personal Development

• ~The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work - Simone Stolzoff~

Conference Articles

• What Every Programmer Should Know About Memory - Ulrich Drepper

• ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering
• https://doi.org:10.1145/1134285.1134355 (462 citations)
• https://doi.org/10.1145/1134285.1134303 (167 citations) - Feature oriented refactoring.
• https://doi.org/10.1145/1134285.1134309 (151 citations) - Backwards-compatible array bounds checking for C with very low overhead
• https://doi.org/10.1145/1134285.1134336 (734 citations) - Who should fix this bug?

• IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
• https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10160171 - Decomposition of Monolith Applications Into Microservices Architectures
• Journal of Systems and Software
• Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages
• More

Health

• The 21 Former Doctor Secrets.
• Bad Therapy: Why Kids aren't growing up.

Blog Posts

• https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/databases/deep-dive-into-postgresql-vacuum-garbage-collector

Great software engineering blog posts

• 21 Lessons From 14 Years at Google
• Choose boring technology
• The law of leaky abstractions
• You can't design software you don't work on
• Seeing like a software company
• No one can force me to have a secure website!!!

Software Engineering Quotes

"Any problem in computer science can be solved with another layer of indirection, except of course for the problem of too many layers of indirection." Bjarne Stroustrup

New Zealand economy

• 2025 NZ Household Wealth Statistics

The top 10% own 48.5% of everything. The bottom 50% share just 6.7%. The bottom 20% have negative net worth. The Gini coefficient is 66.1 (where total inequality is 100), high by international standards.

Our View: The data change represents the COVID property boom crystallised. Those who owned homes in 2021 gained ~$300,000 in paper wealth, but those who didn't own homes watched from the sidelines. The slight improvement in inequality metrics is real but modest - the fundamental wealth structure of New Zealand didn't change.