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…
Category: Topics
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….
How to Hide an Empire by Daniel Immerwahr
Rating: 8.3/10. Book about America’s hidden empire, and how it came to be like this rather than older colonial empires (like the British or French) which conquered large areas of land and populations. The US is now more of a “pointillist” empire that controls specific points of interest around the world, but it’s no less…
The Idea Factory by Jon Gertner
Rating: 7.8/10. Book that describes the origin and eventual breakup of Bell Labs, a research division of AT&T. In the early 1900s, AT&T’s phone service was seen as unreliable and only operated locally; it was expensive with a lot of technical issues. Jewett was a manager who recruited several graduate students at Millikan’s lab who…
Founding Brothers by Joseph J. Ellis
Rating: 7.7/10. Book split into six parts about various parts of the founding of America and the key personnel involved. Now, the American Revolution is extensively analyzed in retrospect, but at the time, the participants had no idea whether their movement would succeed or what it would become. Historians now disagree on whether to analyze…