Blood, Sweat, and Pixels

Great question, I will come back to see what ideas people have. Thanks for the Turing book suggestion too. I have read lots of non-fiction books about programmers and engineers that have been very inspiring, they're just not technical: "Masters of Doom", "Blood, Sweat, and Pixels", "Coders at Work", "The Idea Factory", "The Soul of a New Machine", "Dealers of Lightning"...

Masters of Doom is such a fun, good book. I ended up power reading a few summers ago. If you grew up playing Doom, and all the other shareware games like Hexen, Heretic, etc... reading about Id Software's start and history is more interesting than I ever thought it would be. Another book that drew me in was "Blood, Sweat, and Pixels". It's a collection of short-ish game creation stories packaged into a book. Really candid interviews and writing.

This year I read: 1. The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage: The (Mostly) True Story of the First Computer - A steampunk graphic novel about Ada Lovelace and Charlie Babbage. Fun story with loads of research to back it up. Got even better when I got to go the UK and explore the places they worked at in their livetimes 2. The Hardware Hacker - A compilation of storis by bunnie focused on the hardware/maker(ish) ecosystem. Also discusses the Chinese manufacturing ecosystem and answers questions that most people have about it. 3. Technically Wrong - A book about how tech can sometimes leave lots of people behind for one reason or another and how we can fix them. A very quick read. 4. The Masters of Doom - The story of id Software, the company which spawned an entire genre with games like Doom and Wolfenstwein in its early days.…