Rating: 7.4/10. Book about the history of the Kenai Peninsula, especially the route from Anchorage to Seward. It has many pictures, is fairly short at around 100 pages, and includes descriptions of notable people who lived in this area in the past, modern-day road trip information, and other facts from that time. Prehistory and geography:…
Category: Topics
Gates by Stephen Manes and Paul Andrews
Rating: 8.0/10. Biography of Bill Gates and Microsoft, from the earliest founding days until around 1992, when this book was written. Bill Gates, being the founder of Microsoft, quickly became one of the wealthiest people by making personal computers, and how his both technical ability and business savvy deals made him so successful. Bill Gates…
Two Old Women by Velma Wallis
Rating: 7.9/10. A fairly short novella about two old women of the Gwich’in tribe in Northern Alaska, following a folklore tale where the two old women are seen as complaining and the chief decides to leave them behind. The two women are 75 and 80 years old, and rather than sit down and die, they…
VC: An American History by Tom Nicholas
Rating: 7.3/10. Book about the history of venture capital, which has existed in some form for a long time before evolving into its modern form. The earliest form was sponsoring ocean voyagers, before evolving into the current structure for tech ventures. The book explores the evolution of venture capital in different phases and the conditions…
Ideas the Created the Future by Harry R. Lewis
Rating: 8.8/10 Anthology of famous and influential computer science papers from the beginning of the field until 1980, in chronological order. Each one is abridged to the most important sections, with a short introduction about its context and influence, but is otherwise relatively sparse in annotations or explanations. Reading the papers in chronological order, we…
The Orphan Tsunami of 1700 by Atwater and others
Rating: 7.6/10. Book about the tsunami of 1700, the largest recorded one in the Cascadia region with a magnitude of about 9.0, focusing on written sources in Japan. Around the 1980s, the potential for earthquakes and tsunamis in the Pacific Northwest region was recognized using geological observations, eg, of trees that were suddenly submerged, creating…
The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton M. Christensen
Rating: 7.8/10. Business book that studies how established companies get disrupted by startups. It tends to happen due to a few structural reasons: the disruptive technology starts off underperforming in the mainstream segments that the large company values, performing well only in a niche segment with a small market. By the time the niche market…
Github Actions in Action by Kaufmann, Bos, de Vries
Rating: 7.8/10. Book focused on GitHub Actions and useful for developers and DevOps; some are obvious to a practicing SDE, but many advanced features like self-hosted runners, security, etc, are new to many developers. Chapter 1: The GitHub ecosystem has a variety of tools for developers, including editing, planning, and clients on all devices, including CLI,…
Bellevue: Its First 100 Years by Lucile McDonald
Rating: 7.5/10. Local history book focused on Bellevue, beginning with the first settlers in the area in the 1870s: Mercer and Meydenbauer were the first pioneers, then by the 1890s, a variety of families had settled and built log cabins. The first school opened in 1883, and several more opened in the next few years,…
Turing’s Cathedral by George Dyson
Rating: 6.5/10. Book about the early history of the computer focused on the Princeton group by George Dyson, the son of physicist Freeman Dyson. The book begins around 1953 when only a few computers were in existence, in the middle of a nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union, and von Neumann gets funding to…
Crystal Fire by Michael Riordan and Lillian Hoddeson
Rating: 8.1/10. Book focused on the history and development of the transistor. It has some overlap with The Idea Factory, but is more focused on the transistor specifically, rather than Bell Labs. The transistor is a rather quiet invention: when Shockley, Bardeen, and Brattain first announced it in 1947, it presented as a more efficient…
Trustworthy Online Controlled Experiments by Kohavi, Tang, Xu
Rating: 8.0/10. Book about AB testing best practices in a practical product setting, with many specific recommendations and examples from the authors’ experience in the industry. The image at the front is a HiPPO (highest paid person’s opinion), which is a common although ineffective way of making decisions in organizations that don’t do AB testing….