Christian Bager Bach Houmann

Vibe Coding

The agent-ready codebase

What I've learned about making codebases work for agents.

Never Split the Difference

Chris Voss spent decades as the FBI's lead international kidnapping negotiator, and this book distills that experience into a negotiation system built on psychology. It's practical and well-structured, though some stories run longer than they need to.

The Capitalist Manifesto

Johan Norberg's defense of capitalism against its modern critics, from degrowth advocates to industrial-policy enthusiasts. It's data-dense, covers a wide range of objections, and mostly lets the evidence do the talking. I think it falters slightly when it slips into partisan labeling ("leftist", "right-wing nationalist"), but the core arguments are strong and well-sourced.

Software Engineering at Google

Clear Thinking

The Software Engineer's Guidebook

Gergely Orosz's playbook for the software engineering career ladder, from junior through staff.

Hope and Help for Your Nerves: Learn to Relax and Enjoy Life Again by Overcoming Fear and Nervous Tension

Dare: The New Way to End Anxiety and Stop Panic Attacks Fast

Essentialism

On Liberty

A Man for All Markets

The stories are incredible and the investing chapters are some of the best I've read. Great book - I highly recommend it.

Powerful Python

Well-written with clear explanations and practical examples. Strong opening chapters on generators and iterators. My familiarity with Python made some later material feel routine, but this would be excellent for intermediate developers looking to deepen their understanding.

Zero to One

Interesting read.

AI Engineering

Great book. Highly recommended if you're working with AI.

Building Generative AI Services with FastAPI

A modern guide to building AI services. This is a good read if you're a complete beginner that hasn't developed in the AI space. If you have, it's very likely you'll know what's presented in this book.

Fundamentals of Software Architecture

A solid reference work with useful insights, though the detailed explanations and repeated examples can feel verbose at times. The repetition, while potentially frustrating on a linear read-through, actually serves the book well as a reference tool—you can easily jump back in and find comprehensive explanations of concepts without needing to hunt through the entire text. Great for dipping in and…

LLM Engineer's Handbook

Solid coverage of LLM system concepts—feature pipelines, RAG optimization, MLOps. There's some super useful stuff here. The writing tends to over-explain trivial details while skipping over the interesting architectural decisions. You get a lot of what and how, but not much why or discussion of alternatives. The code examples are a bit rough around the edges—inconsistent patterns, small bugs,…

The 80/20 Principle

The 80/20 principle is a great mental model to have in your arsenal.

The ONE Thing

I read this book early in my life, but I still remember the focusing question. The core theme of asking questions, and thinking hard about which questions to ask, has been useful.

Using AI agents to do months of work in a weekend

Or, how I resolved over 100 issues using a triage bot and coding agents.

Discipline is Destiny

The Minimalist Entrepreneur: How Great Founders Do More With Less

How I use Claude Code

I run multiple Claude Code instances daily for everything from throwaway scripts to production systems. This guide covers the patterns, commands, and workflow optimizations I've developed - including how to use CC effectively with existing codebases, manage parallel agents, and avoid common pitfalls.

How to Read a Book

Adler changed how I think about reading. He argues convincingly against speed-reading fads and surface-level skimming—something I once got caught up in—and instead lays out clear techniques for actively engaging with books. His advice on systematically breaking down a book’s arguments, spotting key ideas, and practical reading techniques is especially valuable.

Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies

After hearing so much about this book in AI circles, it didn't quite match the hype. Bostrom's philosophical background shows as he lists every possible superintelligence scenario, building complex logical structures that often feel like they support predetermined conclusions about inevitable doom. While the constant catastrophe focus gets exhausting and feels disconnected from actual AI…

You Don't Know JS Yet: Get Started

I enjoyed this book. It’s a great, informative deep dive into JS. I don’t always agree with the opinions that are presented, but it’s super refreshing to hear them, as they are often nuanced and reasonable—and they help me question my own beliefs. It’s a fantastic resource for developers looking to truly understand JavaScript’s inner workings.

The Art of Doing Science and Engineering

Hamming's book is a masterclass in intellectual ambition and the pursuit of excellence. It's not just about science or engineering—it's a philosophy for living a meaningful life through deliberate effort and focus on important problems.

Same as Ever

A brilliant exploration of timeless human patterns. Housel masterfully shows how understanding what never changes is more valuable than predicting specific events.

The Blind Watchmaker

Dawkins presents a compelling case for evolution by natural selection, dismantling arguments for design while explaining how complexity can emerge without a designer. His analogies are brilliant, particularly the "blind watchmaker" itself and the biomorphs program. The book thoroughly addresses common misconceptions about evolution and offers clear explanations of complex evolutionary concepts. A…

The Road Less Stupid: Advice From the Chairman of the Board

Filled with practical advice and frameworks for making better decisions.

The Man Who Solved the Market

A fascinating look at how Jim Simons and Renaissance Technologies revolutionized investing through mathematics and data science. Highly recommended for anyone interested in quantitative finance, systematic trading, or how unconventional approaches can lead to extraordinary success.

Node.js Design Patterns

I learned a ton from this book. There were some great explanations for most of the concepts. I feel like the book succeeded at doing what the authors set out to do. The book was somewhat scattered in focus. There was a great depth on some topics, while others had multiple explanations and surface-level explorations at various parts of the book. But they make up for this by covering a lot of…

The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

It's an incredibly interesting book - and overall great read. It's hard to put down, but rewards careful reading, so I took my time with it.

Understanding DeepSeek R1

A detailed look at the DeepSeek-R1 model, and how to run it locally.

Build a Large Language Model (From Scratch)

This book is a good, well-organized guide to building large language models (LLMs). It walks you through everything, from transformer basics to a working GPT-like model. The explanations are clear, and the code examples are helpful. You'll learn the steps, from pretraining to fine-tuning for instruction and classification tasks. The book covers important concepts like tokenization, embeddings, and…

Hands-on Machine Learning With Scikit-Learn, Keras, and TensorFlow

This is a fantastic book. It's great at what it tried to do: give a hands-on introduction to ML. That is, you get a good breadth on the ML field. However, part of the way through, I started missing depth. It doesn't shy away from introducing technical concepts using the mathematical underpinnings, but does not go into some of the (rather interesting) details. I really appreciated that the author…

Be Useful

The book combines Schwarzenegger's personal experiences with actionable advice, making it both entertaining and useful.

Just Keep Buying: Proven Ways to Save Money and Build Your Wealth

"Just Keep Buying" by Nick Maggiulli is a solid personal finance book that emphasizes the importance of consistent investing over time. The central mantra—"Just Keep Buying"—advocates for regularly purchasing income-producing assets like stocks and real estate without worrying about market timing. I appreciated the practical advice on focusing on increasing income rather than just cutting expenses…

Sherlock Holmes and Mental Models

On how pattern recognition and mental models build expertise.

FastAPI: Modern Python Web Development

The book started off well, but it lost me as it went on. The advanced sections fell flat, and it was a bit too all-over-the-place for what I was looking for. By the end, I felt I’d have gotten more from just reading the FastAPI docs.

Keycloak: Identity and Access Management for Modern Applications

This book is a great resource for anyone looking to learn more about identity and access management, and it's a must-read for anyone looking to implement Keycloak in their applications.

The Boron Letters

While obviously dated in terms of advice, it's a rather enjoyable and entertaining read. The writing is great—and you take a thing or two with you.

Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology

Great read! The history and future of chips are both very exciting topics.

Let's Go Further!

Like the previous book, Let's Go, this has been a great learning experience. The author, Alex Edwards, is great at explaining and teaching Go. I particularly enjoyed this book for the more advanced topics and deep dives.

Nicomachean Ethics

The Adam Beresford translation is rather accessible: it’s both easy to read and has helpful notes. This book was interesting. I particularly appreciate the practical approach that Aristotle takes and advocates for. Some parts were too exhaustive to me. Others were hard to put away. Especially the first few “books” and latter half of the final one. A somewhat interesting measure of this book’s…

My Inventions: The Autobiography of Nikola Tesla

An interesting read that offers a glimpse into the mind of Tesla and how he viewed the world. Tesla was remarkable. However, towards the end, the book became a bit too rambling for my taste, venturing into topics far outside the scope of my interest.

TypeScript Cookbook

Great book on TS! I consider myself rather experienced with TypeScript. I've used it a lot in my work, and have even completed a lot of type challenges in TypeScript, but I still learned a lot!

Eloquent JavaScript

Generally enjoyable read. Author had some great takes. The explanations were fine.

The MANIAC

This book is fiction based on fact. It's a real page-turner for sure. I really enjoyed it.