Rating: 7.9/10. Book about the principles of management, written by the former CEO of Intel. It begins with a toy example production process of a restaurant preparing breakfast meals. The first essential principle is to organize the process around the limiting step, which is the step that takes the most time. For instance, in the…
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Gone Viking by Bill Arnott
Rating: 7.7/10. This book is a travel diary journal about the Viking world, mostly taking place in locations visited by the Vikings, such as the UK, Iceland, and Scandinavia (although it’s not limited to these places and also describes places that have no connection to the Vikings, like Hawaii, Haida Gwaii, and Italy). The term…
Racing the Beam by Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost
Rating: 8.0/10. Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System by Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost Book about the Atari VCS (later renamed the Atari 2600), the first widely sold home video gaming console. At first, Atari developed the games themselves, but eventually, they created a platform that allowed third-party developers to release games on…
Tax by Design by Institute for Fiscal Studies
Rating: 9.2/10. Tax by Design: The Mirrless Review by Institute for Fiscal Studies Book about the issues that arise in designing tax systems, and a framework to reason about tax design, with a focus on the UK’s system. Over the last 30 years, there has been a disproportionately large increase in the incomes of the…
Lean Analytics by Alistair Croll and Benjamin Yoskovitz
Rating: 8.2/10. Lean Analytics: Use Data to Build a Better Startup Faster by Alistair Croll and Benjamin Yoskovitz Book about how to use data to make decisions in startups. Every metric you collect should be useful information in making a decision, so avoid collecting vanity metrics like the number of page views or sign-ups. It’s…
The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine by Serhii Plokhy
Rating: 7.6/10. Book about the history of Ukraine from ancient times until 2021, when the book was written. Ukraine was always on the frontier between Europe and Asia, for most of his history, the area was known as “Rus” or “Little Russia”, but they rarely ever were able to form their own state, rather they…
The Staff Engineer’s Path by Tanya Reilly
Rating: 8.3/10. The Staff Engineer’s Path: A Guide for Individual Contributors Navigating Growth and Change by Tanya Reilly Book about the staff engineer role, a position in many tech companies that is separate from software engineering manager and a parallel track. A staff engineer oversees the technical direction for a project, without directly managing reports….
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Rating: 7.7/10. A short novel that describes life in a Soviet Gulag in the Arctic in the 1950s. The author himself spent several years in the Gulag; this is one of the first published books that revealed the inner details of the Gulag system, and controversially, it was allowed to be published in the Soviet…
First-Time Home Buyer by Scott Trench and Mindy Jensen
Rating: 7.9/10. First-Time Home Buyer: The Complete Playbook to Avoiding Rookie Mistakes by Scott Trench and Mindy Jensen Guide to buying real estate, with a focus towards first time home buyers and assumes you’re in the United States (although most of the advice applies to Canada too). The first thing to know is that your…
The Business of Being an Artist by Daniel Grant
Rating: 7.2/10. Book about the business side of art. Ideally, your art would be displayed in a gallery where people will buy it, but galleries themselves face intense economic pressures and they need to sell most of their art in order to break even. Therefore, most artists need to do a lot of thinking like…
Dance Music Manual by Rick Snoman
Rating: 7.7/10. Dance Music Manual: Tools, Toys, and Techniques by Rick Snoman A textbook about music production aimed at intermediate level producers. I don’t often listen to electronic dance music, but the tools and techniques in this genre often transfer to other genres like pop as well. Compared to other genres, dance music tends to…
Thinking in Systems by Donella H. Meadows
Rating: 7.4/10. Book about analyzing “systems”: basically, any collection of things that are interconnected and produce emergent properties. In many situations you will be led astray if you only look at individual events or pieces of the system, you have to analyze the system as a whole to understand its behavior. Examples of systems are:…