His book, "The Nature of Order" is also worth reading, even if it goes practically mystical. There is a theme in thinkers like Alexander, Hofstadter, and less known but tangentially related for his "constructal law," Bejan, where there a kind of aesthetic abstraction yields useful heuristics for more concrete problems. I'm sure there are many others, but these other two were on the brain recently. (Availability bias, surely)

Hofstadter gives you an intuition about complexity and formal hardness of problems. Alexander provides intuition about a kind of quality of reasoning, where from Bejan there is a sense of quality of relational change.

Reading Christopher Alexander is weirdly meditative and good for a technologists soul. I'm always happy to see him rediscovered.