Recommended Resources
You won't find affiliate links here. Books lack links so as not to direct you to any specific store. I have no vested interest in driving traffic or readers to these resources other than to popularise ideas that I'd argue bear repeating.
Podcasts
Deep Questions with Cal Newport
Hosted by computer-science professor Cal Newport, the podcast presents — in my opinion — one of the most balanced and nuanced takes on AI and digital ethics across the board. It also doesn't hurt that his academic background means he can tread deeper into the subject matter without sounding clueless.
Cal's non-absolutist takes on AI are especially refreshing — the episodes usually approach the subject from a purely utilitarian or financial perspective. You won't find hype (or anti-hype) here, only objective and evidence-based discussions of the tech. One of the most important ideas that Cal is popularising at the moment is that the deep negative psychological impact of AI "doomerism" hype far outweighs the merits of the technology.
Favourite episodes: Has AI conquered coding?, Are we about to lose control of AI?, Do I need a brain gym?
Tech Won't Save Us
Award-winning left-wing tech podcast hosted by Canadian technology writer Paris Marx. Each episode has a guest or two on to discuss tech news stories that mainstream media outlets are unlikely to pick up and provides a different perspective on an industry that has so much influence over our lives.
The podcast acts as an excellent critique of the tech industry but sometimes has a habit of veering into politics, which Australian or non-US listeners might find less interesting. Favourite episodes are about the human impact of tech (LLMs in the classroom, anyone?).
Favourite episodes: Canada’s Government is Rushing AI Adoption, The Problem with "CEO Said a Thing" Journalism
Dreaming Against the Machine
Hosted by astrophysicist and science writer Adam Becker, whose book More Everything Forever took apart Silicon Valley billionaires' visions of the future. A lot of hopeful themes and a good mix of pro and contrarian podcasters and authors. Very easy listen.
The conversations come at it through history, science and culture rather than straight tech news, and it's a welcome change from AI commentary that's either doom or hype with nothing in between. It launched in April 2026 so not many episodes to get up to speed.
Favourite episode: Reverse Centaurs and AI, with Cory Doctorow
Books
Designing Data-Intensive Applications
The backend engineer's bible. I'd argue that, nowadays, falling back on well-established system design principles is more important than ever. There's no replacement for understanding database internals, event-based systems and monolith vs. microservice architectures in the types of decisions that LLMs often get wrong.
"You're absolutely right and I apologise profusely. Of course I should have used a Kafka topic here instead of writing it to the local filesystem." Don't do this to yourself. Don't delegate critical architectural decisions to a probabilistic language model.
Team Topologies
The book broadly discusses different software engineering team archetypes (for example, product stream-aligned teams and platform teams) and how to incentivise them in the right manner in order to prevent silos and avoid the very common trap of shipping your organisation's communication structure (Conway's Law).
One aspect that AI has not encroached on (yet) is the actual organisational structure and team composition in software companies. The book does a good job of formalising the art and, perhaps more importantly, lays out a bunch of anti-patterns that we've all observed.
Empire of AI
Karen Hao's Empire of AI is an exploration of how OpenAI shipped a beautiful mission statement and then quietly rebranded itself a non-profit promising open, humanity-benefiting research before mutating into a closed, hyper-scaling commercial juggernaut. Her thesis is that the race to AGI runs on colonial-style extractive practice: vacuum up the world's data without consent, lean on cheap exploited labour, and burn egregious amounts of compute and resources to brute-force capability.
The colonialism analogy was a bit heavy-handed and some events are probably over-dramatised (for example, Altman's exit from and reinstatement into OpenAI). Worth a read, still.
Websites
404 Media
At a time when major media outlets follow the general hype cycle and place too much unearned trust in tech companies and CEOs, independent and critical tech journalism is essential. 404 Media, as of this writing, is one of the good ones.
The Register
London-based news publication with journalists all around the world. I find their reporting quite impartial and more technically accurate than most. I also quite enjoy the cynical writing style they often adopt, especially in more light-hearted articles. Heads up: a lot of UK-specific content.
Dong Knows Tech
It might seem a bit out of place, but as a networking geek, I had to include one of my favourite sources of reviews online. The website is a bit jarring, but the reviews are succinct, cover all of the specs one might need and at least seem to be completely unbiased. Get your fill here of routers so powerful you can provide WiFi to a neighbouring country.