That chart with “Weak Foundation” vs “Solid Foundation” reminds me of Martin Fowler’s chart in his Refactoring book that compares “good design” vs “no design”[0].

[0] https://martinfowler.com/bliki/DesignStaminaHypothesis.html

With a lot of things fighting for my time, could someone give me a TL;DR ? Specifically, is this blog post just another a re-hash of the modern web colour stuff already covered in Refactoring UI[1] ?

[1] https://www.refactoringui.com/book

Personal opinion: The book "Refactoring" by Fowler is one of the worst (tech) books I have ever read. I would rather refer OP to the bible of OOP: Object-Oriented Software Construction by Bertrand Meyer.

+1 for the book. I can also recommend TailwindCSS, which is a CSS framework by the same guys behind Refactoring UI.

The Charisma Myth by Olivia Fox Cabane. The premise of this book is that you can change your psychology to become more of a people person, by cultivating confidence, warmth and the ability to focus. It was recommended by someone on Hacker News six or seven years ago and I wish I remembered who it was so I could thank them. This book changed my life more than any other.

Apprenticeship Patterns by Adewale Oshineye and Dave Hoover: A set of "design patterns" for your career as a software engineer. I read this relatively late on, when my career was in a bit of a rut, and I credit it for giving me the motivation and the tools to get out of that rut. I wish I'd found it earlier.

Other brilliant non-technical books: The Manager's Path by Camille Fournier, Radical Candor by Kim Scott, Mastering Communication At Work by Jon Wortmann and Ethan Becker, Mindset by Carol Dweck, Drive by Daniel Pink, The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg.

Some brilliant books focussing a bit more on tech and code craft: Growing Object Oriented Software, Guided by Tests ("The GOOS Book") by Nat Pryce and Steve Freeman, Refactoring by Martin Fowler, Clean Code and Clean Architecture by Bob Martin.

The Pragmatic Programmer, Refactoring (I'm rereading it after many years with the 2018 edition, opinion not totally formed on this one), Working Effectively With Legacy Code, A Philosophy of Software Design. It's been a long time since I've read Clean Code, I don't quite get the hate from the other thread here today so I'm rereading it now. I figure it'll take me a couple days and worst case I'll agree with the criticism and stop recommending it.

Eric Evans' Domain-Driven Design. I've heard enough about DDD over the years that I figured I'd just go to the source. Liking it so far, I have some good takeaways but we'll see how effectively I'm able to use the ideas over the next couple years.

Martin Kleppmann's Designing Data-Intensive Applications. Based on the frequent praise it receives here, haven't gotten far yet. I have some project ideas (for personal and professional projects) that could benefit from reading through it.

Martin Fowler's 2018 update to Refactoring. I read the original one a long time ago. In context, we have a work lunch & learn series and I'm interested in doing some presentations on the topic of refactoring (why, how, and when in particular) so it seemed appropriate to refresh my memory on some specific terminology from the book as well as to see if it's an appropriate book to recommend to colleagues. My recollection of the first edition is that I'd recommend it to colleagues, but it's been so long I'd rather read it once more before actually recommending it.

I reread Robert C. Martin's Clean Code based on some recent discussion here where it was rather strongly dismissed by a fair number of people. I didn't recall it being bad, my reread confirmed it is not, in fact, bad. Java-heavy, which is now an unpopular style of OOP, but otherwise a very good book. I'd still recommend it to junior colleagues paired with some caveats about avoiding seeing the world in black & white. There is no singular Way of Programming, but learn various ways and find what works for you and your team.

There are some more, but it's almost 5am and I haven't been able to sleep so I don't recall everything that's in the book stack or ebook queue. These are the ones I'm most interested in at present.