Books I read

this list of books I read and what I thought about them, they are not up to date since I stop adding content here in 2020, I usually read about 1 book per month so this list is very out of date, I'll try to fill it up again

2020 books

You Ought to Know Adam Wade

Just a regular guy talking about his passion for storytelling. Interesting part: everything that happened to him helped create the person he is.

Everything’s a Hammer

Complexity: he creates lists to know the work ahead and what has already been done, lists of lists to make things more detailed and simplified.
No project starts out pretty; you need at least 6 iterations before you can show it to someone — “quick and dirty.”
The author starts with the hard parts so he doesn’t lose momentum later and can finish with the easy parts of the project.

10 bullet rules (research)

• Work to code, work within the system
• Sacred space, the studio is sacred
• Be thorough
• Give and get feedback
• Get confirmation
• Keep a list
• Always be noodling (research)
• Take responsibility

Feedback Allows us to work together; without it, there’s no way to improve.
Levels of feedback:

• Recognition: just saying “good job”
• Encouraging: saying why their job is important
• Motivation: explain how they contribute to the result — getting more out of someone
• Constructive feedback about a problem
• Team feedback: a project that goes wrong isn’t just one person’s fault
• Confronting someone about personal problems

(Research)

• The paradox of choice
• Analysis paralysis

Explaining with drawings: Explaining an idea doesn’t work so easily. He suggests explaining to a colleague what we want to do and letting them draw it, and concludes that the person will hardly ever get it right.
Explaining with drawings is easier than with words, and transmitting complex systems to people without the same background is almost impossible.

We Are Bob, We Are Legion

A von Neumann probe that self-replicates in space. Very interesting.
Bob becomes a replicant and leaves Earth.

For We Are Many

The second book of the saga.
Bob finds a new species to take care of, finds his way back to Earth, deals with some terrorists, and encounters an alien species that kills and eats everything.

All These Worlds

The last book of the trilogy.
He finishes the work of the first two books, kills all the aliens, falls in love, marries, and becomes a father.

2019 – 21 Books

How to Win Friends and Influence People

Some points I need to learn: don’t criticize people, avoid arguments because they lead nowhere, and listen more — let people talk and realize the idea I want to convey by themselves.

Whenever you need to convince someone, make them start by saying “Yes.” This makes them more susceptible to accepting your idea.

Principle 1 : Smile
Principle 2 : Take a genuine interest in other people’s lives
Principle 3 : Be a good listener; encourage people to talk about themselves
Principle 4 : Admit your mistakes
Principle 5 : Learn people’s names
Principle 6 : Make the other person feel important
Principle 7 : Have empathy; understand their problem and put yourself in their place

One interesting point is that people don’t improve with criticism; it just embarrasses them and makes habit change forced and unnatural.

This is a fact that reminds me of climate research and the 360 feedback we have at the company — possibly ineffective and leaving the team more divided than improved.

Admitting mistakes:

Admitting that you’re wrong helps the other person admit they were wrong too — sometimes.
It can help in an argument or end it.

Alien Covenant

Unfuck Yourself

Power Moves

Interview about the subject with influential people: an interesting point is that empowering employees makes them more motivated.

Sapiens

The Mountains of Madness

Researchers go to a mountain, find ancient species that once inhabited Earth. A snowstorm kills half the team and the rest flee. Later they return to investigate an ancient abandoned city they found. They see monsters and wall sculptures, but everything turns out to be an illusion caused by grotesque creatures.

This makes me imagine my articles about shitty code — I can apply some of these illusions, seeing something inconceivable and creating narratives instead of boring articles.

Dune

A book about a duke who is overthrown and his son (a prophet) goes to live in a desert community, eats spices, gets high, and goes to war. The ending sucked.

Bad Blood

A book about the Theranos case. It reminded me of Claudio, a guy who deceives people and makes false promises, leading through fear and terror. Apparently, this is a common thing.
I wonder if this isn’t a pattern: managers who lead through fear to hide some problem in the company or in themselves.

Dark Matter: A Novel, by Blake Crouch

A book about a scientist who learns how to create quantum superposition, allowing a person to navigate between multiverses in string theory. By the end, the character is chased by a crowd of himself from other realities.
What I found interesting is how our choices define us. Going back to a choice and changing it won’t take us to a new reality, but to a new self. In the end, who are we? If choices alone change our personality or even our surroundings, living or dying makes little or no difference.

Caesar’s Last Breath

A book about oxygen and gases, and the history of researchers who discovered the elements.
Things I found interesting: -> Oxygen is used to break sugar molecules in mitochondria.
-> Insects breathe through their exoskeletons. Since area and volume don’t grow uniformly, insects that get too big suffocate. If we had twice as much oxygen in the atmosphere, spiders would be the size of dogs!
-> The lung is a membrane that transfers oxygen molecules into the blood; this reaction changes blood color from blue to red.

Norse Mythology

Stories from Nordic culture, mythology, and so on. A great book to understand what was happening at that time with those people.

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

Neuroscience and interesting cases.
One interesting case is a man who wakes up desperate, saying someone implanted a cadaver’s leg in him — he doesn’t recognize his own body as his.
I wonder if the feeling transgender people have about their sexual organs could be a variation of this syndrome.

The Martian

An astronaut gets stranded on Mars after a storm hits the camp where the crew was. The story is so scientifically accurate that it’s impressive.

Ready Player One: 17/07

A teenager living in a dystopia enters a competition for the company that controls the entertainment system the entire world lives in, while facing the IOI company that tries at all costs to win the competition.
I liked the narrator Wil Wheaton and how the book takes the gaming universe into account, tying up loose ends and trying to connect the entire narrative.

The Adventures of Tom Strange

A bad book. My God…

Rivals! Frenemies Who Changed the World

A book about enemies who changed how the world works.
Adidas and Puma are companies founded by two brothers who once ran a business together, but during World War II they split and created a bizarre family feud.

Children of Blood and Bone

Zélie, her brother, and a princess try to bring magic back to the world, while the princess’s shitty brother tries to kill them.
It’s a good book that talks about racism — very good!

American Gods

Shadow is about to leave prison when he gets a call saying his wife is dead. On his way home, he meets an old god (Odin) who gives him a job and has him accompany him to recruit other old gods for a battle that will happen soon.
When the battle approaches, “Wednesday” (Odin) is killed by the new gods. Shadow embarks on a journey to take the god to the other plane and discovers he is Odin’s son.
Not only that, but Odin was deceiving everyone to start a war that would feed him and make him more powerful than ever.
Shadow finds out and ends the war.

The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

DevOps stands for Development + IT Operations (the folks who maintain servers, configure networks, and even change the user’s mouse).

It’s all about the so-called 3 ways:

• Workflow
• Reduce constraints and improve flow
• Continuous improvement and experimentation

Workflow: Sometimes the organization’s problem is understanding where work comes from and where it should go. I remember this when I had a shit ton of work and didn’t know where to start. That’s why we have Kanban boards: to see the work and understand what is WIP (Work in Progress).

WIP is another recurring topic in the book. The author treats WIP as a threat to the company. Imagine a factory: goods enter on one side, become WIP as they go through processing phases, and end up as a final product. If one part of the process takes an employee 1 hour, the rest of the work in that queue must wait 1 hour to be executed.

If we’re stuck in an inefficient workflow, we need to understand the constraint. In the book’s example, it was a heat oven used by two production lines. For that we must:

1. Identify the constraint — what is blocking the project.
2. Exploit the constraint, making sure it doesn’t waste time.
3. Subordinate the constraint — the slowest process dictates development speed.

There are 3 kinds of work:

• Planned work
• Internal work (pet projects or workflow improvements)
• Unplanned work — tasks that come out of nowhere and jeopardize sprints

At this point, we need to figure out what is really work and what we should actually be working on. In my projects, we usually check what really adds value to the client.

Reducing constraints: The solution in the book was to freeze code in all projects and focus on what’s most important, then introduce Kanban to identify WIP.

In this wave, we must establish an upstream feedback loop. In Agile, we do this in retrospectives. We can also use monitoring tools, etc. The goal is to shorten iterations and get more feedback. They even quote the Toyota system: “Improving daily work is more important than doing daily work.”

Continuous improvement: This is a Lean culture. In every project cycle, we should step back, see what went wrong, and improve it — not just bad things, but what’s working too. In the book, even though they made the environment more reliable, they also improved processes so they could deploy more often.

Talking to Strangers

• Default to truth
  We tend to believe that people around us are truthful and mean us no harm.

The Unicorn Project: A Novel about Developers, Digital Disruption, and Thriving in the Age of Data

The 5 ideals:

• The First Ideal is Locality and Simplicity
  How each part of your organization communicates and how easy it is to change part of the application. If you need to go through 5 services to change a simple field, you’re failing this ideal.
• The Second Ideal is Focus, Flow, and Joy
  You must have fun while working; it generates flow for the team.
• The Third Ideal is Improvement of Daily Work
  Like Lean: improving daily work is more important than work itself, like creating bash files to boot Docker images and run services.
  This is commonly related to technical debt.
• The Fourth Ideal is Psychological Safety
  Being able to speak your mind without fear of being fired. It’s the same kind of safety needed by factory workers.

Sensei O’Neill: A blaming culture destroys innovation.

• The Fifth Ideal is Customer Focus
  Create products that matter to users, not to managers.