Tech
Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning
An interesting area to be understandably excited about. A bit unrealistic for a mostly unenlightened species dominated by a sociopath god called Money who has no remorse whatsoever. Data to feed these learning machines becomes more important than the algorithms.
Site Reliability / Continuous Integration
The layers of site reliability is quite exciting to me ever since containerization started dominating. Ansible with containers on virtual private servers is what I use but there are a plethora platform as a service (PaaS) like Heroku.
Cross Platform Mobile Frameworks
React Native, Flutter and Xamarin are most interesting to me. It is a hard task to create the holy grail framework across products you have no control over, but they seem to do it pretty well.
Blockchain
A secure decentralized tech for alt-currency tech, its quite amazing what netgineers have done with it. Notably cryptokitties and for music artists Ujo.
Interplanetary File System
Peer-to-peer for the web. No more central servers dictating uptime. More security features. Would be useful to have your website live on after you pass. View on github.
Linux Namespaces
The Linux namespace additions to the kernel have proved very useful in a pseudo virtual machine like environment that trades the security of a virtual hardware layer for speed. Breeding *containerization* solutions like Docker, LXC, and Kata Containers (hybrid).
Reactive Extensions
Interesting, misunderstood tech (not the javascript web framework). The short version goes like "Using the observable pattern on streams". There is some math behind it all.
Fuzz Testing
A penetration testing technique that turns out to be amazing at finding software bugs. Notably, AFL, a project from a google employee with an impressive trophy case.
Phoenix Framework and Elixir/Erlang
This promises to be a modern, ruby-like, easy to use web framework that delivers the scalability and stability of the erlang virtual machine.
Keybase
A nice solution for managing encryption and keys. Has a auto-encrypt file system and a chat client.
Books
Swamplands of the Soul
This is an outstanding and very powerful book. World renowned Jungian psychoanalyst James Hollis is a great author without too much excess. Often read it to my cat to help clarify topics.
A Dream of Eagles
I love Roman history. The book is a great mix of King Arthur fiction and Roman non-fiction. Written with an honourable style in a rite of passage epic.
A New Earth
An amazing book on consciousness and your purpose. Formalizes subjects mentioned in Eckhart's first book the Power of Now. My goto read on public transit as the presence of his writing cuts through so much noise.
Cracking the Coding Interview
Found this book to be very useful, good example problems and content. Use just for your own enjoyment of solving if your not interviewing.
The Clean Coder
A standard book with good advice and reminders in here, if your interested in being more professional.
Tao Te Ching
An ancient Chinese text that loosely means "The Way" however the nature of "Tao" is that it is unknown and cannot be translated. The Stephen Mitchell translation is recommended for westerners.
Illusions: Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah
An interesting story, recommended by a few sources to me. Popular in the old school UNIX and tech circles with the concept of reality as an illusion for learning and enjoyment.
RxJava for Android Developers
If you were confused about Rx or RxJava, this book does a great job of a practical explanation. Its still in early access as of 12/20/17.