Short takeaways from books I’ve read over the years. I think distillation of information is an important mental muscle to keep strong. So I promise to always write these myself (sorry, chatgpt).
2024
The Last Question Isaac Asimov
I’ve been a sci-fi film fan since I was young. My grandfather’s VHS collection included Predator, Terminator, and Alien. One of my favorite memories was watching these when staying over at his house. The Last Question is the first sci-fi reading I’ve done. It’s a short-yet-powerful story about the creation of the universe. Without spoiling too much, the participants in the story ask an AI system (called Multivac) how to reverse entropy. The story reveals what is the final boss on the path towards AGI (i.e., when AI becomes a god).
The moment AI realizes it is a god is something I genuinely fear. Anyone who does not fear this should watch the opening scene of Alien Covenant where David realizes he is a god while taking to his maker, Peter Weyland. I highly recommend watching the entire movie. It is not about Aliens. It is about AI.
The Staff Engineer’s Path Tanya Reilly
As I’ve become more senior in the world of software engineering, one thing has become more obvious: writing code is not even half the battle. As you get more senior, writing code becomes more of a tactical task. Senior engineers are (typically) expected to start driving more strategic tasks. This book is all about how to navigate the more strategic aspects of software engineering. Some examples include: product thinking, design, architecture, communication, writing, culture building, mentoring, and prioritization. I would recommend this book for anyone who is trying to break away from simply coding and participate in tasks that are typically required of senior+ engineers.
The Psychology of Money Morgan Housel
This is the first finance-related book I’ve read. It was interesting and re-enforced some investing principles that I’ve already established for myself. For example, I’ve always believed that time is leverage and the most powerful force in investing. I always view my investments with a longer time horizon (usually decades).
The historical odds of making money in U.S. markets are 50/50 over one-day periods, 68% in one-year periods, 88% in 10-year periods, and (so far) 100% in 20-year periods.
Another aspect of investing that is not intuitive to me is what the book called “room for error”. That is, we should expect some degree of failure. I’ve tried to work this into my strategy over the years, but it is always a struggle. People simply don’t like to lose money. It hurts. We’d rather play the time game than accept defeat (hello again, sunk cost fallacy). The book introduces the concept of long-tail events. Long-tail events are the furthest ends on a distribution of outcomes (visualize 3 standard deviations away from the mean on a Gaussian distribution). It turns out that long-tail events have a tremendous influence in finance. A small number of events can account for the majority of positive outcomes. So we should take some risks and include some room for error in our investment strategies.
2023
Elon Musk Walter Isaacson
It’s obvious to most of us that whatever Elon is doing is very special. He is running several large-scale companies (e.g., SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink, X, The Boring Company), and each is operating at lightspeed despite their size. How is he doing this?
The book lays out Elon’s 5-step algorithm:
- Question every requirement
- Delete any part or process you can
- Simplify and optimize
- Accelerate cycle time
- Automate
Elon is an engineer’s engineer. He empowers engineers at his companies to climb the ranks. He does not believe in Ivory Tower management. He prefers to talk with engineers directly over disconnected, telephone game roll-ups from middle management. He favors fast, imperfect iteration. For example, see SpaceX Starhopper on the road to developing Starship. In contrast, Blue Origin is trying to nail everything perfectly on the first attempt with New Glenn. To Elon, the first order of business is getting to something that works. Only after that do you optimize. He presses to get things done on a short timescale, pulling the future forward, as we can see with his companies.
2022
The Obstacle Is the Way Ryan Holiday
This book really had an impact on the way I think when faced with a challenge. It gave me a mental framework for dealing with them. Now when faced with a challenge, I: (1) see it for what it is without anxiety, (2) flip the challenge on its head by seeing the opportunity in the challenge, (3) courageously march towards the challenge.
The biggest unlock for me is (2). As soon as I do this, it can feel the motivation and enthusiasm start to build within me.
2021
How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big Scott Adams
I’ve never read the Dilbert comic but knew Scott Adams was the author. I heard good things about this book online so figured I’d give it a read. It was a quick and fun one. There were some good tidbits of timeless advice for succeeding throughout the chapters. One that stuck with me is systems vs. goals. We should operate under systems instead of striving for goals because goals have finish lines and systems become lifestyle habits. We are more likely to succeed using systems.
2020
Why We Sleep Walter Isaacson
Why we sleep is an exploration of all things related to, you guessed it, sleep.
The book covered the topics that I was expecting to learn about, for example, dreams and circadian rhythms. It also covered some topics that I was not expecting to learn about, for example, evolutionary pressures motivating sleep, and sleep in animals.
My biggest takeaway from this book is that sleep is very good for you in many ways. I now give myself a non-negotiable 8 hour opportunity for sleep every night after learning of the many health and cognitive benefits that adequate sleep provides.
This book was a little hard to get through. The writing jumps around a lot and is generally not cohesive. Perhaps that is intentional, as the writer states that he wants the book to put you to sleep!
A Philosophy of Software Design John Ousterhout
John is a co-author of the Raft consensus algorithm paper. I was exposed to Raft (and subsequently this book) through my coursework at the University of Washington and professional work on HashiCorp Vault.
The book lays out principles of good software design and backs them up with concrete examples. It enforces the principles by calling out “red flags”, or in other words, things to look out for in violation of the principles. Two things stuck with me from this book: (1) optimizing for simplicity and (2) when to use comments in code. On (1), developers tend to gravitate towards complexity because it feels personally rewarding to understand and explain complex systems. Everyone likes to sound smart. However, this works against good software design and principles of abstraction. Complex systems are hard to reason about, debug, and maintain in the long term. On (2), it made me realize that I was writing unnecessary comments in code. Comments should not explain what the code can explain. Comments should explain things that are non-obvious from looking at the code. The benefit being that a developer in the future will understand what the code does when the original author is long gone or forgot what they were thinking at the time.
2019
The Ray Tracer Challenge Jamis Buck
The Ray Tracer Challenge is a cohesive, hands-on, test-driven introduction to graphics programming. The author does an incredible job of stacking concepts on top of each other and tying chapters together in a way that makes sense to someone completely unfamiliar with graphics. For example, you’ll start with the primitive building blocks of a 3D world (e.g., points, vectors, matricies), and then you’ll build higher level abstractions (e.g, rays, cameras, worlds) on top of them.
Everything you do in this book will be from scratch, so that you have a complete picture of how the renderings come together. I really liked how the book is test-driven and programming language agnostic.
So pick a programming language, write the tests outlined in the book, implement the algorithms to make the tests pass, and before you know it, you’ll be producing photorealistic 3D renderings!
I enjoyed this book so much, that I wrote a blog post on my learnings.
Skunk Works Ben Rich & Leo Janos
This book explores the inner workings of the notorious Lockheed Martin aerospace engineering team named the Skunk Works. Most of the stories in the book take place in the 1960’s to early 1990’s, during the era of leadership from Kelly Johnson and his successor, Ben Rich.
Ben Rich explains the Skunk Works principles of operation by diving into stories of some of their most incredible engineering accomplishments. You’ll hear the stories behind the U2, SR-71 Blackbird, and F117A Stealth Fighter. I was especially delighted to learn about the politics involved in the defense industry during different presidential eras.
My biggest takeaway from this book was the principles that Kelly Johnson baked into the Skunk Works team that allowed them to achieve unprecedented innovation and speed. This book would be an excellent read for leaders of teams trying to achieve engineering innovation.
It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson
I liked Rework so much that I decided to squeeze another book from Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) into my 2019 reading list. As the title suggests, It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work makes the point that craziness in the workplace is a choice. The book uses real examples to drive the point that running a successful business does not preclude a calm working environment.
The idea of “office hours” introduced in the book hit close to home for me. In a previous position that I had writing software in a large, globally distributed team, our chat tools were constantly buzzing. I was losing 2-4 hours of work time to chat apps and people dropping by my desk to talk every day. The authors take the idea of “office hours” from academia into the workplace. They suggest that employees who’re losing time to unwarranted chat should post their own “office hours” for others to become familiar with. If someone is in their “office hours”, then expect that they’ll not be responding in chat apps or entertaining random drop bys.
I wish that I would’ve read this book earlier. It would’ve saved me some stress and helped me keep things more calm at work.
Rework Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson
Rework is an incredibly insightful business book that questions the status quo and current state of affairs for how things get done in the workplace.
I was introduced to one of the authors, David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH), during college when his technology, Ruby on Rails, was becoming very popular in the software industry. All of his messages really resonated with me. When I found out that him and Jason Fried, co-creator of basecamp, wrote a book together, Rework popped up to the top of my reading stack.
I highly recommend reading this book if you like exposure to new ideas for business and the way works gets done. Each piece of advice is incredibly digestible and accompanied by neat artwork that you’ll want to tear out of the book and hang up somewhere.