Chapter 03 — The Mental Stack

The
Shelf

12 Books Read
01 Reading Now
08 On Wishlist

Not a book recommendation list. These are books that actually changed how I think — about systems, about people, about history. Every entry here includes what I actually got from it, not what you're supposed to say about it.

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Currently Reading
Platform Engineering on Kubernetes
Mauricio Salatino · Add your current read here
The Phoenix Project
Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, George Spafford
Featured — Most Impact

The Phoenix Project

Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, George Spafford · 2013
★★★★★ 5/5 — Changed how I see IT work

I read this during a phase where I was underwater in firefighting and couldn't figure out why everything was always on fire. This book gave me the vocabulary for what was wrong. It's not a technical book. It's a book about systems thinking applied to humans doing tech work. The Three Ways hit me like a brick — and I've never looked at a bottlenecked pipeline the same way since.

What I actually took from it
Work in progress is inventory. Inventory is waste. I started killing WIP ruthlessly after this.
The constraint defines throughput. Everything else is noise. Stop optimizing non-constraints.
Brent is every senior engineer on every team. The problem isn't the person — it's the system around them.
DevOps isn't a job title. It's a cultural operating model. That distinction matters enormously.
DevOps Systems Thinking Business Novel

All Books

12 entries
002
Accelerate
Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, Gene Kim
The data behind DevOps performance. This is the book to hand your manager when they ask why you want to invest in platform work. The DORA metrics became my personal benchmark after reading this.
★★★★★ Completed
003
The DevOps Handbook
Gene Kim, Jez Humble et al.
The operational companion to Phoenix Project. Dense but worth every page. I dogeared the sections on deployment pipelines and kept coming back to them whenever I was designing a new CI workflow.
★★★★☆ Completed
004
Annihilation of Caste
B.R. Ambedkar · 1936
Nothing I could write here would do this justice. Ambedkar wrote this as a speech he was never allowed to deliver. Read it. Then read it again. The logic is surgical and the moral weight is immense.
★★★★★ Completed
005
Gulamgiri
Jyotirao Phule · 1873
Phule connected the dots between the social hierarchy in India and organized religion in a way that was genuinely dangerous to write at that time. Reading it in 2024 made me appreciate how far ahead he was.
★★★★★ Completed
006
The Hard Thing About Hard Things
Ben Horowitz
No-nonsense leadership in a world of nonsense advice. The chapter on "peacetime CEO vs wartime CEO" alone is worth the read. Made me think differently about what it means to actually lead vs manage.
★★★★☆ Completed
007
The Psychology of Money
Morgan Housel
The most readable finance book I've found. Not about returns or tactics — it's about behavior. The insight that "enough" is the hardest number to define stuck with me for weeks after finishing it.
★★★★★ Completed
008
Your next entry
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Each book here is a data point in an ongoing experiment — can I compound my mental models the same way I compound wealth?
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Raw
Thoughts

Unfiltered takes from the margins
The Phoenix Project
"The goal is not to do DevOps. The goal is to deliver value to the business faster, with higher quality and lower risk."
I used to optimize pipelines because pipelines were interesting to me. This book reoriented me — pipelines are a means, not an end. The question should always be: what does the business actually need?
Annihilation of Caste
"You cannot build anything on the foundation of caste. You cannot build up a nation, you cannot build up a morality."
Reading Ambedkar as someone from Maharashtra, from Marathwada — the history isn't abstract to me. It's the ground I grew up on. That's what makes this book land differently than it might for others.
Accelerate
"High-performing teams deliver software faster, more reliably, and with more stability. These are not trade-offs — they move together."
The data killed the argument that you have to choose between speed and stability. I've referenced this finding in internal conversations more times than I can count. Evidence beats opinion every time.
Psychology of Money
"The ability to do what you want, when you want, with who you want, for as long as you want, is priceless."
This is the definition of financial independence I actually keep. Not a number. A state of optionality. That reframe changed how I think about every financial decision.

On the Wishlist

Books I haven't read yet but intend to

Site Reliability Engineering
Google SRE Team
Designing Data-Intensive Applications
Martin Kleppmann
Shivaji — The Great Maratha
Ranjit Desai
Staff Engineer
Will Larson
An Era of Darkness
Shashi Tharoor
Thinking in Systems
Donella Meadows
The Elephant in the Brain
Kevin Simler, Robin Hanson
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