I can expand more or add to this list later, but here’s a quick list of books I love:

• Albert Camus - The Fall
• Aldous Huxley - Brave New World
• Aldous Huxley - Island
• Daniel Keyes - Flowers for Algernon
• David Foster Wallace - Infinite Jest
• Douglas Adams - The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
• Ernest Hemingway - A Farewell to Arms
• F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby
• Franz Kafka - Metamorphosis
• George Orwell - 1984
• George Orwell - Animal Farm
• George Orwell - Homage to Catalonia
• H.P. Lovecraft - The Colour Out of Space
• Hermann Hesse - Steppenwolf
• J.D. Sallinger - The Catcher in the Rye
• J.K. Rowling - Harry Potter series
• J.R.R. Tolkien - The Hobbit
• John Green - Looking For Alaska
• John Steinbeck - In Dubious Battle
• John Steinbeck - Of Mice and Men
• Kurt Vonnegut - Cat’s Cradle
• Kurt Vonnegut - Mother Night
• Lewis Carrol - Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass
• Mark Z. Danielewski - House of Leaves
• Neil Gaiman - The Ocean at the End of the Lane
• Orson Scott Card - Ender’s Game
• Orson Scott Card - The Worthing Saga
• Oscar Wilde - The Portrait of Dorian Gray
• Philip K. Dick - Ubik

Java

• Willing to take a small speed decrease in order to have a much better time programming than C/C++
• Need to interface with <Obscure Technology>. Because Java probably has a library for it

Kotlin

• Want/need to use Java libraries but want to feel modern

Groovy

• I want to write a version of Java that gets rid of everything good about Java while keeping all of the bad

C

• Need the maximum amount of speed possible

C++

• Need the maximum amount of speed possible while also having the maximum number of language features that don’t fit together

Javascript

• Need to write something quick for the browser

Typescript

• Need to write something large for the browser

Python

• Short scripts, one-offs
• Want to have a good time programming while not caring about speed or ease of refactoring

Go

• Want the power of concurrency, but don’t want to actually learn concurrency

Clojure

• Want/need to use Java libraries but are a hipster
• Rich Hickey is my spirit animal
• Seriously though, Clojure is really good for processing data. It has a lot of functions in the standard library for manipulating lists and maps. It’s my tool of choice when working with large JSON files.

Rust

• I’m a sub and I want my compiler to be the dom

Haskell

• Want to prove that all those years of mathematics were useful
• Want to feel superior to the plebs that can’t understand your beautiful monads

OCaml

• Want to use a high-level language but am intimidated by Haskell
• Want a functional language with the opportunity to use imperative programming without having to wrap all values in a ThisIsImpureDontLetItContaminateThePurity monad

PHP

• No
• Just no

Best Practices

Everything is Code

Advantages:

• Copy paste! Easily take concepts from one project and use them in another
• Source control. See who changed what why.
• Rebuilding. If you have everything in source control, it becomes way easier to rebuild in case of a disaster.
• Editing. You know what computers are really good at? Manipulating text. Take advantage of that by expressing everything as text.

And by everything, I mean EVERYTHING that you possibly can. Jenkins jobs, server configuration, Spinnaker pipelines. All of these things can be expressed in text form.