Books I Plan to Read in 2026

This is my 2026 reading plan: focused, practical, and tied to problems I want to solve this year.

The list

The Psychology of Money — Morgan Housel
Behavioral finance and decision-making under uncertainty. I want the mental models, not just the numbers.

Principles — Ray Dalio
I want a clearer system for decision hygiene, especially around hiring, feedback, and operating cadence.

Designing Data-Intensive Applications — Martin Kleppmann
Re-read for depth. I want to revisit consistency trade-offs and operational lessons as system scale grows.

The Staff Engineer’s Path — Tanya Reilly
Focus on technical leadership without management. I want to sharpen how I influence across teams.

The Art of War — Sun Tzu
Strategy, clarity, and composure under pressure. Useful framing for incident response and planning.

The Let Them Theory — Mel Robbins
Letting go of control to reduce friction and improve collaboration. I’m curious how it applies to teams.

System Design Interview, Part 2 — Alex Xu
Practice on deeper distributed systems patterns and trade-offs.

Software Engineering at Google — Titus Winters, Tom Manshreck, Hyrum Wright
For long-lived codebases and engineering culture at scale.

Why this list

• Build stronger decision frameworks.
• Improve strategic thinking and calm under pressure.
• Go deeper on system design and long-term maintainability.