Recommended Reading

A short, growing list worth reading once you have built a few websites. None of it is required. Pick whatever speaks to you and read it slowly.

Why a reading list in a course about building things? Because AI can write the code for you, but it cannot hand you taste, or the judgment to tell good work from the forgettable kind. That part stays with you, and these reads help you grow it.

🎨 Taste and Design

• Paul Graham: Taste for Makers Why good work has a quality you can recognize, and how you train your eye to see it. The essay that started this page.
• Dieter Rams: Ten Principles for Good Design A famous, very short checklist for what makes a design good. Worth a look before your next round of polish.
• Jeff Huang: This Page Is Designed to Last The case for simple, dependency-free websites that still work decades later. It quietly backs up the plain HTML and CSS you are shipping to GitHub Pages.

🌱 How to Learn

• swyx: Learn in Public The habit behind your learning logs. Share what you figure out and it sticks better, and other people find you along the way.
• Julia Evans: How to Ask Good Questions A warm, practical guide to asking the kind of question that actually gets you unstuck. Pairs with the read it, write down your question, then ask habit.
• Paul Graham: How to Do Great Work A long one, so save it for a quiet weekend. Paul Graham on curiosity, choosing what to work on, and doing work you are proud of.

🤖 Building with AI

This space moves fast, so follow the writers rather than chasing any single post.

• Simon Willison's blog Hands-on, honest notes on building real things with LLMs, from someone who codes with them every day. Notice how much of the work is steering the AI and checking what it gives back.
• Ethan Mollick: One Useful Thing A Wharton professor on what AI can actually do and how to use it well in real work. His angle is judgment and clear thinking about how to use AI.

This list grows over the semester. If you find a short read that changed how you think about building things, bring it to a lightning talk and it may end up here.

Last updated: Sunday, 6/14/2026