Books that read like stories.

The Imposter's Handbook

The CS degree you never got, in one book.

I don't have a CS degree. For years I nodded along in discussions about Big-O and state machines while quietly panicking inside. So I took a year and taught myself everything I had missed, then wrote it all down. This is the book I needed on day one, and over 30,000 self-taught programmers have used it to finally feel like they belong in the room.

The Imposter's Roadmap

Everything beyond the code.

Getting good at code turns out to be the easy part. Moving up means leading projects, shipping on a deadline, and navigating personalities that would make a therapist flinch. Nobody hands you a map for that part of the career, so I drew one from 25 years of doing it the hard way - at Microsoft, Visa, Google, PayPal, and a few startups that shall remain nameless.

A Curious Moon

Learn PostgreSQL on your way to Saturn.

Twenty five years of building software never taught me Postgres, and when I finally sat down to learn it properly, every tutorial read like a tax form. Data is not boring - it is the whole story - so I wrote a Postgres book that reads like a novel. You learn window functions because the mission needs them.