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Books, apps, and tools people actually name.

Compare how many distinct people recommended, used, liked, owned, built, or avoided the same item—then inspect every transcript excerpt behind the count.

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Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

2 distinct people

recommends / book

“So the three books I'm going to recommend, the first one's a beautiful poetic book about typography called The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst. Robert was the poet laureate of Canada. And the first 80 pages will change how you think about typography. It will open you up to the wonderful world of typography that we all live in. You'll think differently about every sign you look at, about every movie credit you see, and it will give you an insight into the designer mindset. When you understand typography, I think you understand where designers come from and the best designers I know are just total type nerds. So highly recommend Elements of Typographic Style. Second book, Zen and the Motorcycle Maintenance. Many people may know ultimately a philosophy book, but it's about the concept of quality, which I think is a very important topic. So it talks about quality and the importance of how things integrate into cohesive whole, which I believe is the main challenge facing most software teams. They create something that's highly fragmented instead of a single hole. So, Zen in the Motorcycle Maintenance. And then the last one is a book called Time in the Art of Living by Robert Gruden. It's just a very interesting collection of impressionistic views of time and how time passes and what time means. So that's very different from the others and it's not something probably gets recommended on your show too often, but I think it'll help people in their lives in a powerful way.”

Bob Baxley · Lenny's Podcast · 35 years of product design wisdom from Apple, Disney, Pinterest, and beyond | Bob Baxley · 12 Jun 2025

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likes / book

“Timeless Way of Building by Christopher Alexander. He wasn't really an architect, but he, I think, taught in Berkeley. He has these interesting thoughts about building things and he focuses on buildings and towns and these kinds of spaces, but I think there's a lot of things that are also interesting for building software. The other book that I like is the Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, because it also talks about the quality of things and I think that's one of the main themes of the book. The thing is also that quality is so hard to define. If you actually start thinking about it, it's like, how do you define it? It's really hard to pin down, but it's like when you try something or see it, then you know if it's quality or not.”

Karri Saarinen · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · 8 Oct 2023

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