The Books I Read This Year (2024)
April 01, 2025
Every year, I try to take a short inventory of the books I read throughout that year. I find that doing so helps me solidify the concrete things I learned from each. You can see last year’s list, too, if you would like.
The Power of Moments by Chip Heath
I heard about this book while reading The Intentional Father as the author often referenced this book when advocating for intentionally spending money and time creating special moments and memories with your children. I picked it up and was blown away. From reconsidering daily habits (and how to flip the script to create unique moments), to thinking more deeply on about things like customer journeys or milestones, this book offers several “blueprints” for how to create special moments in your life and career. I plan on referencing this book often in the years to come.
The Common Rule by Justin Whitmel Earley
I read Habits of the Household in 2023 and decided this year to read Justin’s first book, The Common Rule. Rules tend to have a negative connotation today, but having a rule of life is more about making a conscious decision about how you want to life your life and creating daily patterns that propel you in that direction. Much like Atomic Habits, the idea is that by creating habits or patterns in our life, we can actually free up ourselves from daily decision making and experience more freedom and peace. While I don’t agree with every element of Justin’s rule, it acted as a spring board for how my wie and I want to lead our family.
Software Architecture: The Hard Parts by Neal Ford & Mark Richards
Our engineering book club at Vouch decided to read this book last year as we were undergoing a re-platforming effort for some of our systems. We picked this book up thinking it would spark really useful conversation about how we would go about our effort. Instead, we were sadly disappointed. I felt this book was much more focused on promoting one very specific way of designing software systems (namely: how to migrate from a monolith to microservices), but still failed to give useful advice for how to actually evaluate tradeoffs or compare different architectural patterns. We choose another book part way through the year so perhaps there is more useful content that I didn’t get to, but generally would recommend skipping this one.
God and Money by Greg Baumer & John Cortines
I’ve read several books before how to to manage and think about personal finances, but most of have been focused on a single end goal: building a lot of wealth. God and Money is different in that it asks a dangerous question: how much do you really need? Through personal stories and well-grounded advice on money management, John and Greg lay out a helpful framework for how to manage your personal finances through a biblical lense. Worth the read and I’ve suggested to many others already.
Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection by Charles Duhigg
Communication is hard; no one would dispute that. Many books have been written on improving communication tactics and tools, but Supercommunicators is a bit different. Instead of focusing on specific techniques, it focuses much more on why those techniques work in the first place. The biggest takeaways from this big for me are twofold: you can turn any “basic” conversation into a meaningful question by focusing more on emotion (and that most people are more open to those conversations than you might think), and that the first part of any conversation is about aligning what conversation you are having. Often by matching energy and aligning on what the conversation is about, you can have much more productive dialogue.
Thanks for reading!
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Dan Goslen is a software engineer, climber, and coffee drinker. He has spent 10 years writing software systems that range from monoliths to micro-services and everywhere in between. He's passionate about building great software teams that build great software. He currently works as a software engineer in Raleigh, NC where he lives with his wife and son.