Rating: 7.9/10. Book about behind the scenes of payment systems, written by a senior employee at Marqeta, a payments startup, and it walks through various things that happen during credit card and debit card transactions. Overall, a high-level overview of many parts of the behind-the-scenes of payments. The book is relatively short and high-level and…
Category: Topics
Disrupting the Game by Reggie Fils-Aimé
Rating: 7.5/10. Memoir by Reggie Fils-Aimé, the chief operating officer and a marketing executive of Nintendo in the Americas during the early 2000s and 2010s, and this journey up to the position as well as what he did for the company. He was raised in New York to a Haitian immigrant family in a crime-ridden…
The Travelling Cat Chronicles by Hiro Arikawa
Rating: 8.3/10. Warning: this review contains major spoilers. A heartwarming novel set from the point of view of a cat called Nana. In the introduction, he used to be a stray cat living in the street, and he is hit by a car and then rescued by a man, Satoru, who takes him in. Throughout…
The Gardener and the Carpenter by Alison Gopnik
Rating: 8.1/10. Book about the science of human childhood and parenting, and how modern practices sometimes conflict with the ways that humans evolved, and why the way children behave have deep biological explanations. We should think of the role of a parent as tending to a garden, where you can create conditions but you can’t completely control…
The Hardware Hacker by Andrew Bunnie Huang
Rating: 8.0/10. Book by hardware hacker about experiences manufacturing in China and hacking hardware to do interesting things, the author Andrew “Bunny” Huang is an influential figure in the hardware and security hardware community. It describes various experiences related to manufacturing in China, as well as several projects involving electronics (mostly for advanced hobbyists), and his…
Expecting Better by Emily Oster
Rating: 7.8/10. Book by an economist trying to make sense statistics about what to do during and after pregnancy, based on studies in the medical literature. She tries to be as evidence-based as possible, sometimes going against convention when the studies show otherwise. Much of the time, the evidence is weak due to the difficulty…
High Performance Python by Micha Gorelick and Ian Oszvald
Rating: 8.3/10. Book covering some fairly advanced optimization techniques in Python, such as the different types of runtimes or ways to call into C, data structures that are memory efficient or increase cache coherence; libraries that can do operations faster than plain Python, ways to do concurrency, multithreading, and a little bit about distributed systems…
The Grid by Gretchen Bakke
Rating: 8.3/10. Book about the electricity grid, focusing on America and its history. Though the grid is usually hidden away in our lives, it is actually a complex arrangement of different local systems that has physical constraints, as all power generation must match usage at all times because it is not possible to store large…
Cobalt Red by Siddharth Kara
Rating: 7.5/10. Book of investigative journalism covering the DRC (Congo), where 70% of the world’s cobalt mining occurs. Cobalt is a metal that is crucial for the development of high-efficiency lithium-ion batteries that are used in smartphones, other electronic devices, and most importantly, electric vehicles; the Congo has some of the purest forms of the…
Too High and Too Steep by David B. Williams
Rating: 7.8/10. Too High and Too Steep: Reshaping Seattle’s Topography by David B. Williams Book about the history of Seattle focusing on how humans have changed its natural landscape, eg by filling in the shoreline and tide flats, creating artificial islands, and leveling hills near the city center. The landscape has changed quite drastically since…
Digital Empires by Anu Bradford
Rating: 7.6/10. Digital Empires: The Global Battle to Regulate Technology by Anu Bradford Book about models and recent trends in tech regulation — it is written in a fairly academic tone but contains many insights. I found it somewhat heavy and stopped reading about halfway through the book. The tech world is dominated by three…
AI Agents in Action by Michael Lanham
Rating: 7.5/10. Book about the latest developments in AI agents, covering a lot of common patterns like all use agentic loops, using prompt engineering and no-code tools to build and configure their agent and evaluate it. Most of the book consists of walkthroughs of various different agent libraries and platforms and tutorials of how to…