Fond memories! My first job out of uni was building interfaces for embedded devices using XUL/javsacript/xpcom/c++. The technologies were fun to develop in at the time and it felt special to be somewhat of a part of such a big open project.
I think my biggest recommendation is David Graeber. Perhaps something like Towards an Anarchist Anthropology. In a similar way to Kropotkin, Graeber challenges a lot of narratives that form the basis of capitialism e.g. that all we did was barter before we had money, that it was the enlightenment that first introduced the world to freedom and equality etc.. Instead, he shows that there are many cultures in the past, and contemporary, that have significant anarchist tendencies (mutual aid, direct democracy, solidarity etc). I believe understanding this is key to expanding the anarchist tendencies in our own culture.
"Conquest of Bread" had a huge impact on my politics. It cut through the capitalist realist narrative that we're all in economic competition and that capitalism is the only sane solution. It made me feel like another world is possible. I changed my life to pursue these other possibilities ever since.
Satisfying static types AND 100% code cov is a significant burden.
If you're intrigued by this approach, or perhaps by a similar approach with typescript, I highly recommend checking out a strictly strong typed language at some point. I've been coding in Elm and a little in Haskell, and I find that the type checking is so thorough and exhaustive that I only need to write very few tests to get strong guarantees. This was a very pleasant change from Rails where you are encouraged to aim for 100% code cov, and as such, would spend well over 40% of my development writing tests.
Great comment! This brought back so many similar memories - spending hours configuring Enlightenment and tweaking my desktop with transparency and flames (I hope Rasterman is still out there coding somewhere), everything2, audioscrobbler and last.fm.
You're so right that the internet seemed so full of possibilities.