Stats for nerds
3recommend
7mentions
5people
2015–2025years
57% recommend43% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Here is another good thread from a few days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33849267
Here is the list of some of the good books I read this year https://brajeshwar.com/2022/books/
Starting this year, instead of writing the list at the year-end, I have decided that I will just write as I read along. Besides the 5 odd I listed from a comment on this thread, here are others I have listed from other threads on Hackernews and Twitter. The URL is a pattern anyway, so it will be https://brajeshwar.com/2023/books/
- How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question by Michael Schur, https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/How-to-Be-Perfect/Mic...
- [How to Stop Worrying and Start Living](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Stop_Worrying_and_Start...) is from the popular author [Dale Carnegie](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dale_Carnegie) of the [How to Win Friends and Influence People](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Win_Friends_and_Influen...) fame.
- A young girl's diary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diary_of_a_Young_Girl)
- Greenlights by [Matthew McConaughey](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_McConaughey)
- How Asia Works: Success and Failure In the World's Most Dynamic Region
- How the World Really Works: A Scientist’s Guide to Our Past, Present and Future by Vaclav Smil
- How To Talk: Siblings Without Rivalry by [Adele Faber](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adele_Faber)
- Impact Mapping: Making a big impact with software products and projects
- Monetizing Innovation: How Smart Companies Design the Product Around the Price
- Product-Led Growth: How to Build a Product That Sells Itself
- Rewire Your Anxious Brain: How to Use the Neuroscience of Fear to End Anxiety, Panic, and Worry
- The Courage To Be Disliked: How to free yourself, change your life and achieve real happiness
- [The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_th...) by [Douglas Adams](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Adams)
- [Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming](https://www.amazon.com/Windfall-Booming-Business-Global-Warm...) by [McKenzie Funk](https://www.mckenziefunk.com)
- The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read: (and Your Children Will Be Glad That You Did) by Philippa Perry
- I'm a software engineer, but these have been instrumental in my success in a way no coding book can compare to(though John Ousterhout's "A Philosophy of Software Design" would have, if it came out earlier in my life).
Personal time/task management- The classic, Getting Things Done(https://www.amazon.com/Getting-Things-Done-Stress-Free-Produ...). The power this has on people cannot be understated. Turns out that most of how life is conducted is rife with forgetfulness, decision paralysis, prioritization mistakes, and massive motivation issues. This book gives you specific workflows to cut through these in a magical way.
Personal Knowledge Management- The equally classic, How to Take Smart Notes(https://www.amazon.com/How-Take-Smart-Notes-Technique/dp/398...). Where GTD(above) does this for well-defined tasks/work, this book does it for open-ended work, giving you an amazing workflow for introducing "Thinking by Writing", which is frankly a superpower. This lets you see things your friends/colleagues simply won't, lets you deconstruct your feelings better, learn new/deeper subjects faster, and connect thoughts in a way to produce real insight.
For Product/Business Management, Gojko Adzic's "Impact Mapping"(https://www.amazon.com/Impact-Mapping-software-products-proj...) feels like it could make nearly every software team/business 10x better by just reading this book. I've personally watched as enormous portions of my life were spent on things that barely moved the needle for companies, or merely didn't keep the metric from rising. So many projects taken on faith that if you work on X, X will improve, without ever measuring, or asking if you could have accomplished that with less. The world looks insane afterward.
- I love the shift in focus, specifically toward what your organizational goals are. However, it isn't clear to me where many of these metrics are coming from- are they manually input, or is it possible to connect them to a data source?
I've found that often without connecting to actual measurements, it's easy for teams to do dozens of hours of effort where a single hour of that effort achieves the majority of the effect, because when measurements aren't used directly, people will often just throw energy at the problem until it "feels" done. Sometimes this even means all that effort accomplished nothing. This is why I'm such a big fan of Impact Mapping[1].
1. Impact Mapping: https://smile.amazon.com/Impact-Mapping-Software-Products-Pr...
- (blog author here) Thanks for adding the link. Absolutely - it's one of the inspirations for us using this approach. I'd also add Gojko Adzic's Impact Mapping (http://www.impactmapping.org/) as a further source of ideas that was in the back of my mind when tweaking and adapting Blog Post Driven Development with our team.
Perhaps one of the things I should have stressed more is what good fun it is to have robust debate about why our work matters! Planning SDK work (even refactoring / housekeeping) doesn't have to be dull.
- Cal Newport, So Good They Can't Ignore You. This book convinced me to stop widening my skillset by beginning again, and start doubling down on my strengths.
Gene Kim et al., The Phoenix Project. This book reinvigorated my love for management, which I lost in 2021–2022. I'm still an IC, but I decided to stop refusing management roles.
Kent Beck, Extreme Programming Explained, 2nd Edition. This book lit a fire under my ass to figure out better ways of working. I followed it up with the next one in a book club at work.
James Shore et al., The Art of Agile Software Development, 2nd Edition. This book gave me hope that a productive, humanist, productivity-oriented workflow can work in today's software world. I read it with my teammates in a book club at work, including the software engineers, QA tester, product owners, and UX designer. Unfortunately the rest of my team had little interest in putting it into place where I work.
Robert C. Martin,
Clean Architecture. This book was a delightful read. Uncle Bob weaved practical advice together with stories from his past that served both to illustrate his points and to entertain. While I don't agree with every word in the book (e.g. Screaming Architecture), I still recommend it to every Senior+ Software Engineer.Eric Evans,
Domain-Driven Design: Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software. Aside from its amazing content, this book has some of the best typesetting I've ever seen. I sought out a font that is a match (or near-match) and reverse-engineered the letter spacing, line height, heading font sizes, etc. Its content was great too, but I was glad to have read Vaughn Vernon's DDDD first.Vaughn Vernon,
Domain-Driven Design Distilled. This book followed up Shore's work in our book club at work. Everybody on the team really liked what they read, but nobody felt like they had actionable insights. So the engineers went on to read Vernon's IDDD, and the non-engineers read Adzic's IM and Patton's USM.Vaughn Vernon,
Implementing Domain-Driven Design. I read this book with a book club at work. While Evans's work was well-grounded in theory and left a lot of interpretation in the patterns behind DDD, Vernon is a practical, nuts-and-bolts DIY guide to one approach to DDD. Luckily, these tactics resonated with my team and our codebase has seen marked improvements in the past few months. I'm looking forward to our process catching up so we can do more than "DDD Lite."Jeff Patton,
User Story Mapping. This book was fun, practical, and completely outside any way I'd ever worked. It also helped me understand exactly why I've failed every time I tried to make my own SaaS startup on nights and weekends.Gojko Adzic,
Impact Mapping. This book was basically a pamphlet. The process seems...good? But since I'm no longer in a role with the influence or authority to recommend product direction, I doubt I'll get much use out of this for a while.Tanya Reilly,
The Staff Engineer's Path. This book wants to follow in the footsteps of Camille Fournier's The Manager's Path, but it seemed less specific and useful as a roadmap. Perhaps that's because of how different "Staff Engineer" is from company to company, at least when compared to the roles covered by Fournier. But it did help me earn my promotion to* Staff Engineer, so it was clearly worth reading.Tamar Rosier, Your Brain's Not Broken. This book was the second I read after I got diagnosed with adult ADHD. I appreciated that it helped me de-stigmatize, because I harbored some bummer feelings when I realized no actually I didn't grow out of it. It also helped me reflect on my habits of action, and see them in a new light. I was surprised to see how much of my anger and frustration in life was a coping mechanism to help me get things done. I've had a much calmer life since recognizing that.
Alexander Tarlinder, Developer Testing. I'm not quite finished with this book, but I'll be done by the end of the year. It's been a great overview of automated testing from the perspective of a programmer. It helped refresh my memory on things I knew but forgot. It filled gaps that I had in my baseline knowledge. It corrected things I "knew" but was slightly incorrect about. I now recommend this to any programmer, whether or not they've got a habit of testing.
Austin Kleon's trilogy: Steal Like An Artist, Show Your Work, Keep Going. These books were cute, full of incredibly quotable passages, and fun to read. I didn't spend enough time on them, though. A lot of the lessons I thought I'd learned left my brain like water through a sieve.
Kent Beck, Tidy First?. This book helped me understand the economics of software through a new light. That was important to me, because during the time I spent as a Director of Software Engineering I was not given a budget and asked to manage the department's expenses.
Antonio Cangiano, Technical Blogging, 2nd Edition. This book convinced me to start a blog. It was going really well, and then I shrank back from it due to fear of vulnerability. Since I got over those fears and started blogging again, it's been a lot of fun again. I incorporated what would've been tweets into the blog (as "quick posts") in addition to my longer-form, less-ephemeral content (as "articles"). Writing has been a great way to solidify what I've learned and distill my opinions. Heck, I should migrate this comment to my blog.
I also read other books (especially on my journey to becoming a magician), but these were the ones I thought Hacker News might be most interested in.
- Following up on the exciting thread of the good books in 2022, what books have you tentatively planned to read in 2023? I have earmarked quite a few just from the comments in that thread.
Here are a few I'm excited about;
- Greenlights by Matthew McConaughey
- How Asia Works: Success and Failure In the World's Most Dynamic Region by Joe Studwell
- How the World Really Works: A Scientist's Guide to Our Past, Present and Future by Vaclav Smil
- How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question by Michael Schur
- How to Stop Worrying and Start Living by Dale Carnegie
- Impact Mapping: Making a big impact with software products and projects by Gojko Adzic
- Monetizing Innovation: How Smart Companies Design the Product Around the Price by Madhavan Ramanujam, Georg Tacke
- Product-Led Growth: How to Build a Product That Sells Itself by Wes Bush
- Rewire Your Anxious Brain: How to Use the Neuroscience of Fear to End Anxiety, Panic, and Worry by Catherine M. Pittman, Elizabeth M. Karle
- The Courage To Be Disliked: How to free yourself, change your life and achieve real happiness by Ichiro Kishimi, Fumitake Koga
- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
