At some point late in 2023 I have realized that I have stopped reading books and I have decided to make an effort and stop killing my brain cells scrolling through social media. Instead, I started dedicating my evening time to reading books. I am still not 100% consistent with it - but in 2024 I read more books than in 2019,2020,2021,2022 and 2023 years all combined. Today I am looking back at the books I have read and what I learned from them.
Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed
— by Ben R. Rich and Leo Janos 〈goodreads〉
The dictionary defines skunkworks as an experimental laboratory or department of a company or institution, typically smaller than and independent of its main research division. I have heard this term before and was familiar with its meaning - but what I did not know was that this term originates at Lockheed Martin. Skunk Works was a pseudonym for Lockheed Martin’s Advanced Development Programs division.
Even if you like me don’t care much about aircraft design, you probably still heard at least something about F-117, U-2 and Blackbird (SR-71). All of these aircrafts were developed at Lockheed Martin by Skunk Works.
It was interesting to read a personal recounting of how these and few other
projects went written from the perspective of Ben Rich, the lead developer
behind F-117. Not being an aeronautics buff I read this book mostly as an
expose on life of a scrappy high expertise R&D team. It was rather interesting
to note parallels between Skunk Works and a tightly knit senior software
engineering team.
Here is one of my favorite quotes from the book:
Our work areas were very skunky, ladders all over the place, lots of wiring to trip over, an oil slick or two. We had worked fast and loose from day one—with seldom an accident or a screwup. That was part of our charm, I thought. We were great innovators, rule benders, chance takers, and when appropriate, corner cutters. We did things like fuel airplanes inside an assembly area — a strictly forbidden act that risked fires or worse—to solve the problem of not having to move a very secret airplane into daylight to see if its fuel system leaked. Our people knew what they were doing, worked skillfully under intense pressure, and skirted hazards mostly by sheer expertise and experience. But as we grew, the skill level decreased and sloppiness suddenly became a serious problem.
The type of engineering you are doing as a high performing senior team is not going to work for you when you need to bring juniors on board and scale yourself.
I was also surprised to learn that the math behind F-117 was derived from a paper by Soviet scientist Pyotr Ufimtsev:
I wish I could claim to have had a sudden two a.m. revelation that made me bolt upright in bed and shout “Eureka!” But most of my dreams involved being chased through a maze of blind alleys by a horde of hostile accountants wielding axes and pitchforks.
The truth is that an exceptional thirty-six-year-old Skunk Works mathematician and radar specialist named Denys Overholser decided to drop by my office one April afternoon and presented me with the Rosetta Stone breakthrough for stealth technology.
…
Denys had discovered this nugget deep inside a long, dense technical paper on radar written by one of Russia’s leading experts and published in Moscow nine years earlier. That paper was a sleeper in more ways than one: called “Method of Edge Waves in the Physical Theory of Diffraction,” it had only recently been translated by the Air Force Foreign Technology Division from the original Russian language. The author was Pyotr Ufimtsev, chief scientist at the Moscow Institute of Radio Engineering. As Denys admitted, the paper was so obtuse and impenetrable that only a nerd’s nerd would have waded through it all — underlining yet! The nuggets Denys unearthed were found near the end of its forty pages. As he explained it, Ufimtsev had revisited a century-old set of formulas derived by Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell and later refined by the German electromagnetics expert Arnold Johannes Sommerfeld.
…
“Ufimtsev has shown us how to create computer software to accurately calculate the radar cross section of a given configuration, as long as it’s in two dimensions,” Denys told me. “We can break down an airplane into thousands of flat triangular shapes, add up their individual radar signatures, and get a precise total of the radar cross section.”
Talk about globalization of knowledge! You might have all the scientific insight you need but you can fail capitalize on it.
Understanding Michael Porter: The Essential Guide to Competition and Strategy
— by Joan Magretta 〈goodreads〉
My wife hooked me up on this book by reading passages aloud for me to hear. I found those really insightful - even though I (unlike her) had no idea who this Michael Porter is.
If rivals all pursue the “one best way” to compete, they will find themselves on a collision course. Everyone in the industry will listen to the same advice and follow the same prescription. Companies will benchmark each other’s practices and products (see “One-Upmanship Is Not Strategy”). Competing to be the best leads inevitably to a destructive, zero-sum competition that no one can win. As offerings converge, gain for one becomes loss for the other. This is the very essence of “zero sum.” I win only if you lose.
When choice is limited, value is often destroyed. As a customer, you are either paying too much for extras you don’t want, or you are forced to make do with what’s offered, even if it’s not really what you need.
In practice, then, head-to-head competition is rarely “perfect” for either customers or the companies that serve them. Yet Porter notes with some alarm that it is precisely this kind of zero-sum competition that has come increasingly to dominate management thinking.
For Porter, strategic competition means choosing a path different from that of others. Instead of competing to be the best, companies can — and should — compete to be unique. This concept is all about value. It’s about uniqueness in the value you create and how you create it.
…
Competing to be the best feeds on imitation. Competing to be unique thrives on innovation.
After a couple of these I just could not wait for her to finish rereading this book to jump into it myself… and it did not disappoint.
My day-to-day job is far removed from a business strategy side of things, but I found it interesting to try and translate Porter’s ideas into the realm where programming languages (or more broadly: any programming technologies) compete for the market share. This book also gave me a better tools to understand why certain strategies are not strategies at all.
Strategy, then, defines a way of competing, reflected in a set of activities that delivers unique value in a particular set of uses or for a particular set of customers, or both.
…
While not every single activity need be unique, robust strategies always involve a significant degree of tailoring. To establish a competitive advantage, a company must deliver its distinctive value through a distinctive value chain. It must perform different activities than rivals or perform similar activities in different ways.
The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail
— by Clayton M. Christensen 〈goodreads〉
I was drawn to this book by the same interest that made me read “Understanding Michael Porter”: I wanted to see if the classical business writing can reveal anything interesting about the realm of programming languages. To a software engineer or a PLT researcher it might seem that the key to the adoption of a programming language lies in devising the best type system or implementing the fastest virtual machine or the best tooling. But the practice seems to show again and again that this is not the case. Some other factors seems to be at play here - and understanding these factors requires understanding people and business relationships rather than lambda calculus and low-level programming.
One of the key observations of this book is that a well run company can fail by catering too much to its existing customer base and as result failing to anticipate and react in time to a disruptive innovation which creates a larger and more lucrative market. Christensen argues that values which make large companies successful and profitable are often the very same values which prevent these companies from capitalizing on disruptive innovations. When everything at the company is tuned to squeeze the last bit of profit from an existing market - such company can’t quickly enter a new market which opens through the disruptive innovation.
In the instances studied in this book, established firms confronted with disruptive technology typically viewed their primary development challenge as a technological one: to improve the disruptive technology enough that it suits known markets. In contrast, the firms that were most successful in commercializing a disruptive technology were those framing their primary development challenge as a marketing one: to build or find a market where product competition occurred along dimensions that favored the disruptive attributes of the product.
It is critical that managers confronting disruptive technology observe this principle. If history is any guide, companies that keep disruptive technologies bottled up in their labs, working to improve them until they suit mainstream markets, will not be nearly as successful as firms that find markets that embrace the attributes of disruptive technologies as they initially stand. These latter firms, by creating a commercial base and then moving upmarket, will ultimately address the mainstream market much more effectively than will firms that have framed disruptive technology as a laboratory, rather than a marketing, challenge.
A lot of the book is dedicated to history of HDDs, but it also tells a number of interesting stories from other technological sectors. I was personally fascinated by these two. One was the story of Honda breaking into North American motorcycle market.
Honda’s success in attacking and dominating the North American and European motorcycle markets has been cited as a superb example of clear strategic thinking coupled with aggressive and coherent execution. According to these accounts, Honda employed a deliberate manufacturing strategy based on an experience curve in which it cut prices, built volume, aggressively reduced costs, cut prices some more, reduced costs further, and built an unassailable volume-based low-cost manufacturing position in the motorcycle market. Honda then used that base to move upmarket and ultimately blew all established motorcycle manufacturers out of the market except for Harley-Davidson and BMW, which barely survived. Honda combined this manufacturing triumph with a clever product design, catchy advertising, and a convenient, broad-based distributor/retailer network tailored to the informal cyclists who constituted Honda’s core customer base. Told in this manner, Honda’s history is a tale of strategic brilliance and operational excellence that all managers dream will be told about them someday. The reality of Honda’s achievement, as recounted by the Honda employees who were managing the business at the time, however, is quite different.
During Japan’s years of post-war reconstruction and poverty, Honda had emerged as a supplier of small, rugged motorized bicycles that were used by distributors and retailers in congested urban areas to make small deliveries to local customers. Honda developed considerable expertise in designing small, efficient engines for these bikes. Its Japanese market sales grew from an initial annual volume of 1,200 units in 1949 to 285,000 units in 1959.
Honda’s executives were eager to exploit the company’s low labor costs to export motorbikes to North America, but there was no equivalent market there for its popular Japanese “Supercub” delivery bike. Honda’s research showed that Americans used motorcyles primarily for over-the-road distance driving in which size, power, and speed were the most highly valued product attributes. Accordingly, Honda engineers designed a fast, powerful motorcycle specifically for the American market, and in 1959 Honda dispatched three employees to Los Angeles to begin marketing efforts. To save living expenses, the three shared an apartment, and each brought with him a Supercub bike to provide cheap transportation around the city.
The venture was a frustrating experience from the beginning. Honda’s products offered no advantage to prospective customers other than cost, and most motorcycle dealers refused to accept the unproven product line. When the team finally succeeded in finding some dealers and selling a few hundred units, the results were disastrous. Honda’s understanding of engine design turned out not to be transferable to highway applications, in which bikes were driven at high speeds for extended periods: The engines sprung oil leaks and the clutches wore out. Honda’s expenses in air-freighting the warrantied replacement motorcycles between Japan and Los Angeles nearly sunk the company.
Meanwhile, one Saturday, Kihachiro Kawashima, the Honda executive in charge of the North American venture, decided to vent his frustrations by taking his Supercub into the hills east of Los Angeles. It helped: He felt better after zipping around in the dirt. A few weeks later he sought relief dirt-biking again. Eventually he invited his two colleagues to join him on their Supercubs. Their neighbors and others who saw them zipping around the hills began inquiring where they could buy those cute little bikes, and the trio obliged by special-ordering Supercub models for them from Japan. This private use of what became known as off-road dirt bikes continued for a couple of years. At one point a Sears buyer tried to order Supercubs for the company’s outdoor power equipment departments, but Honda ignored the opportunity, preferring to focus on selling large, powerful, over-the-road cycles, a strategy that continued to be unsuccessful.
Finally, as more and more people clamored for their own little Honda Supercubs to join their dirtbiking friends, the potential for a very different market dawned on Honda’s U.S. team: Maybe there was an undeveloped off-the-road recreational motorbike market in North America for which—quite by accident—the company’s little 50cc Supercub was nicely suited. Although it took much arguing and arm-twisting, the Los Angeles team ultimately convinced corporate management in Japan that while the company’s large bike strategy was doomed to failure, another quite different opportunity to create a totally new market segment merited pursuit.
Once the small-bike strategy was formally adopted, the team found that securing dealers for the Supercub was an even more vexing challenge than it had been for its big bikes. There just weren’t any retailers selling that class of product. Ultimately, Honda persuaded a few sporting goods dealers to take on its line of motorbikes, and as they began to promote the bikes successfully, Honda’s innovative distribution strategy was born.
Honda had no money for a sophisticated advertising campaign. But a UCLA student who had gone dirt-biking with his friends came up with the advertising slogan, “You meet the nicest people on a Honda,” for a paper he wrote in an advertising course. Encouraged by his teacher, he sold the idea to an advertising agency, which then convinced Honda to use it in what became an award-winning advertising campaign. These serendipitous events were, of course, followed by truly world-class design engineering and manufacturing execution, which enabled Honda to repeatedly lower its prices as it improved its product quality and increased its production volumes.
Honda’s 50cc motorbike was a disruptive technology in the North American market. The rank-ordering of product attributes that Honda’s customers employed in their product decision making defined for Honda a very different value network than the established network in which Harley-Davidson, BMW, and other traditional motorcycle makers had competed.
The second one is the story of Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly:
Another case of performance oversupply and disruptive technology precipitating a change in the basis of competition—and threatening a change in industry leadership—is found in the worldwide insulin business. In 1922, four researchers in Toronto first successfully extracted insulin from the pancreases of animals and injected it, with miraculous results, into humans with diabetes. Because insulin was extracted from the ground-up pancreases of cows and pigs, improving the purity of insulin (measured in impure parts per million, or ppm) constituted a critical trajectory of performance improvement. Impurities dropped from 50,000 ppm in 1925 to 10,000 ppm in 1950 to 10 ppm in 1980, primarily as the result of persistent investment and effort by the world’s leading insulin manufacturer, Eli Lilly and Company.
Despite this improvement, animal insulins, which are slightly different from human insulin, caused a fraction of a percent of diabetic patients to build up resistance in their immune systems. Thus, in 1978, Eli Lilly contracted with Genentech to create genetically altered bacteria that could produce insulin proteins that were the structural equivalent of human insulin proteins and 100 percent pure. The project was technically successful, and in the early 1980s, after a nearly $1 billion investment, Lilly introduced its Humulin-brand insulin to the market. Priced at a 25 percent premium over insulins of animal extraction, because of its human equivalence and its purity, Humulin was the first commercial-scale product for human consumption to emerge from the biotechnology industry. The market’s response to this technological miracle, however, was tepid. Lilly found it very difficult to sustain a premium price over animal insulin, and the growth in the sales volume of Humulin was disappointingly slow. “In retrospect,” noted a Lilly researcher, “the market was not terribly dissatisfied with pork insulin. In fact, it was pretty happy with it.”
Lilly had spent enormous capital and organizational energy overshooting the market’s demand for product purity. Once again, this was a differentiated product to which the market did not accord a price premium because the performance it provided exceeded what the market demanded.
Meanwhile, Novo, a much smaller Danish insulin maker, was busy developing a line of insulin pens, a more convenient way for taking insulin. Conventionally, people with diabetes carried a separate syringe, inserted its needle into one glass insulin vial, pulled its plunger out to draw slightly more than the desired amount of insulin into the syringe, and held up the needle and flicked the syringe several times to dislodge any air bubbles that clung to the cylinder walls. They generally then had to repeat this process with a second, slower acting type of insulin. Only after squeezing the plunger slightly to force any remaining bubbles—and, inevitably, some insulin—out of the syringe could they inject themselves with the insulin. This process typically took one to two minutes. Novo’s pen, in contrast, held a cartridge containing a couple of weeks’ supply of insulin, usually mixtures of both the fast-acting and the gradually released types. People using the Novo pen simply had to turn a small dial to the amount of insulin they needed to inject, poke the pen’s needle under the skin, and press a button. The procedure took less than ten seconds. In contrast to Lilly’s struggle to command a premium price for Humulin, Novo’s convenient pens easily sustained a 30 percent price premium per unit of insulin. Through the 1980s, propelled largely by the success of its line of pens and pre-mixed cartridges, Novo increased its share of the worldwide insulin market substantially—and profitably. Lilly’s and Novo’s experiences offer further proof that a product whose performance exceeds market demands suffers commodity-like pricing, while disruptive products that redefine the basis of competition command a premium.
The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions - and How The World Lost its Mind
— by Dan Davies 〈goodreads〉
I both liked and hated this book - I learned a few interesting things from it: e.g. it was my first encounter with Project Cybersyn - a failed Chilean attempt to create an infrastructure for computer assisted planned economy.
The book also introduces the concept of an accountability sink which deeply resonates with me:
It is important to be clear, at this stage, exactly what an accountability sink is, and how they are constructed. It’s not just the way in which the hourly paid worker has been set up to act as a human shield. In order to make the sink effective, you need a combination of things: that person, plus a policy that there’s no way to appeal the decision by communicating with a higher level of management. (Even if you somehow managed to get the CEO’s phone number, you would come up against the fact that the policy was in place precisely to protect them from making that decision personally.)
So the crucial thing at work here seems to be the delegation of the decision to a rule book, removing the human from the process and thereby severing the connection that’s needed in order for the concept of accountability to make sense. You could even coin a sort of law of management here:
The fundamental law of accountability: the extent to which you are able to change a decision is precisely the extent to which you can be accountable for it, and vice versa.
The construction of accountability sinks has damaging implications for the flow of information. For an accountability sink to function, it has to break a link; it has to prevent the feedback of the person affected by the decision from affecting the operation of the system. The decision has to be fully determined by the policy, which means that it cannot be altered by any information that wasn’t anticipated. If somebody can override the accountability sink and overrule a policy that is in danger of generating a ridiculous or disgusting outcome, then that person is potentially accountable for the outcome.
I agree with Davies that our society and especially large corporations spend inordinate amount of time constructing these accountability sinks allowing highly paid people in charge (politicians and CEOs) to hide from the consequences of their actions, which are mostly experienced by those living on lower levels of the hierarchy.
The book culminates with blaming Friedman doctrine for everything that
is wrong with our society today. I don’t really disagree with this - but I
feel that the book spent too many pages to make its point.
The Man Who Broke Capitalism: How Jack Welch Gutted the Heartland and Crushed the Soul of Corporate America―and How to Undo His Legacy
— by David Gelles 〈goodreads〉
With this book I continued my journey into the heart of everything that is
wrong with corporate America. General Electric (GE) is a fascinating
company with a track record of originating or contributing to major innovations
in the first half of 20th century. In the second half of the century the company
ballooned to a juggernaut which quarter after quarter would beat analysts
expectations - driving its share price to incredible heights. Then the music
stopped and GE came crashing down.
Turns out that GEs profitability was achieved in the ways which could not be sustained long term: endless acquisitions, layoffs, restructurings, offshoring, stock buybacks, financialization and creative accounting - making earnings reports look good and maximizing shareholder value in a way which would make Milton Friedman proud, while destroying the company from within. Gelles also tells stories of companies lured into hiring top-managers from GE in the hope that these managers will help them to drive their earnings up in the same way that Welch did to GE. Unsurprisingly results were much less rosy than expectations.
Sobering read - especially if you look around and notice that Welchism is alive and well today, being applied in companies big and small.
If Welch was going to make GE the most valuable company on earth, he knew he would have to do it with GE Capital. From the moment he first worked with the finance division in the late 1970s, he understood a simple but powerful truth: it was easier to make money by shifting around ones and zeros than by manufacturing refrigerators. “Since I had been involved in making things all my life, pounding and grinding it out to make nickel, I couldn’t believe how easy this appeared to be,” he recalled of his first exposure to the world of investment banking, leveraged buyouts, and loan financing. “I was sure the opportunity was enormous. All we had to do was take the business from the back of the boat to the front.” In a memo to the company’s chief financial officer, Welch wrote that finance, not manufacturing, represented the future of the company. “There is no place that quantum change is needed more than in Finance”, he wrote. “Finance is not an institution - it has to be … the driving force behind making General Electric ‘the most competitive enterprise on earth’”.
Well, I threw up a bit in my mouth just retyping this from the book.
Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System
— by Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost 〈goodreads〉
I am too young to have experienced Atari firsthand - but I have at least heard about it. I think it is impossible to not have heard about it if you are at least somehow involved with computers and games. When I picked this book up I expected something similar to Fabien Sanglard’s fabulous Game Engine Black Book: Wolfenstein 3D and Game Engine Black Book: DOOM - a technical walkthrough through Atari capabilities and deep dive into the technical challenges of programming games for it. Unfortunately this book was rather thin on that… instead it walks you through different games which were released for Atari and the impact they had.
Blood, Sweat, and Pixels
— by Jason Schreier 〈goodreads〉
Game development is a famous for unsustainable schedules and people sleeping
under desks to meet deadlines. I wanted to be a game programmer when I was
a high-schooler - but then I discovered programming languages and never looked
back. This book gave me a small opportunity to peak under the covers and see
how games are made.
I must admit that I have never played a single game of those described in the book but that did not make the book less enjoyable to read. Don’t think I learned anything though - turns out that game development is hard work and stress and politics all mixed together just like in any other branch of software development.
Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology
— by Chris Miller 〈goodreads〉
I got this book because I became interested in learning more about TSMC and
ASML and the current state of semiconductor technology. I think the book does
a good job at giving you a historical overview of how things got the way
they are today.
The highlight of the book for me was the description of the extreme ultraviolet lithography. The kind of complexity that goes into building one these EUV lithography machines - and the web of world binding supply chains this creates
- is mind boggling. EUV light is produced by hitting a tiny (30 micron) tin droplets flying through a vacuum at 300 km/h with a laser pulse (twice) to evaporate it into plasma. The produced bursts of light are collected using special mirrors made of hundreds of alternating layers of silicon and molybdenum - each layer just few nanometers thick. MindBlown.GIF
Your Competent Child: Toward New Basic Values for the Family
— by Jesper Juul 〈goodreads〉
I picked up this book when our son was just born and only this year I have finally managed to read it. You will be disappointed if you pick it up expecting a reference manual on how to handle your relationship with a child. What this book offers instead are insights into why (at least according to Jesper Juul) people behave the way they behave and what it means in context of building a relationship with your growing child. Applying these insights is up to you as a parent.
This book got me to pause and think more than a couple of times… and that is, if you ask me, a sign of a good book.
In a loving relationship between two equal adults, both have equal responsibility for the quality of the interaction. But adults have complete responsibility for the quality of their interaction with children. This applies to the interaction between children and parents in a family, and between adults and children in nursery schools, day care, schools, and in society.
When I say that adults need to take responsibility for the interaction, I do not mean that they need to take the child’s side. What I mean is that even though children and young people influence the process in the interaction with adults, children are not capable of assuming responsibility for it. When children have to take the responsibility for the interaction, they do not develop in healthy ways.
Only recently have we begun to understand the factors that need to be present so that children will thrive. The problem is that the way in which we, as adults, influence this process is to a great extent beyond our control. We influence it via our personality (our conscious and subconscious conflicts with ourselves and each other); via the feelings and moods we ignore or repress (the changes of mood we ourselves fail to detect); and via our exaggerated desire to do the right thing and our fear of doing the wrong thing—to mention just a few of the factors.
This is the power we have over our children. Irrespective of what qualities they may have been born with, we have power over the interactive processes that determine their development and quality of life, until they themselves become adults and take over.
In other words, having high moral standards and trying to do what is “right” cannot guarantee that our children will turn out well, as our parents and grandparents believed. We must abandon the whole idea that it is at all possible to do “what is right.”
Instead, we must develop a code of ethics for our relationships with children according to which we keep our ears and eyes open for the blunders that we inevitably make, and openly assume responsibility for them. This is the only ethical practice that can set children free so that they can develop in healthy ways. Help is available—from our children themselves, in the form of the competent feedback they give us whenever we reach an impasse.
With Languages in Mind: Musings of a Polyglot
— by Kató Lomb 〈goodreads〉
Kató Lomb is a famous Hungarian simultaneous interpreter, who allegedly could interpret in ~10 languages and claimed to understand a total of 16 languages. I picked up this book because I wanted to learn more about her approach to learning foreign languages. This book is not that though: its an random mix of her thoughts on studying foreign languages and foreign languages themselves. Truly a book of musings like the title honestly admits. Maybe I should have read Polyglot: How I Learn Languages instead - but reviews indicate that its written in a similar haphazard style.
Many people question the expediency of language acquisition based on reading. They may be right. I am a language learner by profession. I do not undertake the activity of language teaching. I feel like an amateur at teaching.
Amateurs are characterized by, among other things, not being able to transcend their own confines. A dilettante cook will prepare well only what he eats with pleasure. A non-professional seamstress will botch clothes not sewn to her own size or taste. I would like to emphasize that the method I have been promoting for years was tailored to people with the same intellectual build as mine. It leads to success for those whom I usually call bookworms.
The main attribute of this type is not reading a lot. Reading— such as devouring crime stories—is often nothing but an escape from reality: an intoxicant and a narcotic. Of course, it is still less dangerous than alcohol or marijuana.
But it is not the number of pages consumed per week that makes someone a reader; it is the ability to enter the pages of a book
A character’s fate becomes the reader’s fate; the author’s style becomes the reader’s style. The plane of pages becomes a three-dimensional space of reality in which readers, too, have their place. This is how the inter esse will function as a vehicle and catalyst for acquiring knowledge. Self-sufficiency develops, and the most expedient means of memorization occurs: emotional-affective tension. Genuine readers sail with Robinson Crusoe, throw themselves under the train with Anna Karenina, and die of tuberculosis with the Lady of the Camellias. Afterward, luckily, they come back to life.
I frequently emphasize the importance of books. I might overemphasize it. But books were how my generation became acquainted with the realities of life, and books were our refuge if those realities proved too stern.
The Rules of Programming: How to Write Better Code
— Chris Zimmerman 〈goodreads〉
I don’t think a seasoned software developer will learn anything groundbreaking
from this book - I personally skimmed through pages rather than immersed myself
in them. Though even seasoned software developers might find articulations
from this book helpful - it is always reassuring to see in writing what you
just kinda intuitively felt. But I can totally recommend it to more junior
developers.
There’s a real cost to extra complexity. It takes longer to write complicated code than simple code, and much longer to debug it. Anyone reading the code has to fight their way through the complexity to understand what’s going on. Our Simple solution has none of these problems—it’s easy to get it right the first time, and it’s easy to glance at it and understand both how it works and that it’s correct.
In fact, this single issue — do you solve Easy problems with Simple solutions? — is the best discriminator between mediocre programmers and good ones. When we interview candidates at Sucker Punch, we look for two things: can the candidate solve Hard problems, and do they write Simple solutions for Easy problems? Unless the answer is yes to both of these questions, we’re not interested.
Someone writing Complicated solutions to Easy problems isn’t just making their own job harder, they’re making it harder for everyone else on the team. Not only do their solutions take more time to create and introduce more bugs into the codebase, those solutions are more difficult and frustrating for everyone else to work with. We can’t afford that.
…
The difference between mediocre programmers and good ones is that good programmers write Simple answers to Easy problems. The difference between good programmers and great ones is that even as the problem gets Harder, the great programmer still finds a Simple solution.
The Forbidden Code Review
Ok, this rule here is something I learned the hard way in my career: allowing junior programmers to review each other code is a recipe for a a disaster. I was really glad to see Zimmerman laying it out in writing. The last combination, a junior coder reviewing another junior coder’s work, is not useful. In fact, it can be really destructive. All of the benefits I just discussed evaporate when both coders are junior. There’s no knowledge transfer, there’s not enough context to find bugs, and there’s no using the code review as a springboard to talk about future directions. At worst, the two junior coders reflect half-formed opinions back and forth until they seem like official team policy. When weird paradigms and conventions pop up in Sucker Punch code (which happens, despite our best efforts), it’s often a result of two junior coders ping-ponging reviews back and forth. So we ban this sort of code review.
Good Omens
— by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman 〈goodreads〉
I used to devour Terry Pratchett’s books when I was in high-school, but it has been many years since I’ve read anything by him. I got The Illustrated Good Omens as a birthday present from a friend of mine couple of years back and it was patiently seating on the shelf waiting to be read.
It’s a solid but overhyped book - if you ask me. It was fun to read, it made me smile here and there - it was Pratchett-y in all the right ways, but it was all it was. It was nothing but an escape from reality: an intoxicant and a narcotic borrowing words from Kato Lomb.
The Palace of Dreams
— by Ismail Kadare 〈goodreads〉
Ismail Kadare died on the 1st of July 2024 - that’s when I heard about him for the first time. When I first read about him I became fascinated by the fact that he was audacious enough to sneak obviously subversive and critical Palace of Dreams past communist censors by hiding the critic within a seemingly historical setting - novel itself unfolds in an alternative version of an Ottoman Empire. Here is what Wikipedia writes about his strategy:
Kadare camouflaged an excerpt of The Palace of Dreams as a short story and published it, alongside Broken April, The Ghost Rider, and The Wedding, in his 1980 collection of four novellas, Gjakftohtësia (Cold-bloodedness). Due to its seemingly historical nature, the excerpt went unnoticed by the censors. The following year, under the same title, Kadare managed to sneak the whole novel into the second edition of Emblema e dikurshme (Signs of the past); due to the fact that the story had already been green-lighted once, it managed to escape the attention of the censors once again.
The novel was eventually condemned and banned, but only post factum: 20000 copies were already sold.
I really enjoyed reading the novel, as much as the world enjoy reading a story unfolding in a bleak totalitarian society ruled by the whims of its Sovereign, who itself is manipulated by eponymous Tabir Sarrail ( Palace of Dreams) - a shady government body tasked with collection and interpretation of dreams:
“The Tabir Sarrail or Palace of Dreams, as it’s called in the language of today, is one of our great imperial State’s most important institutions….”
He was silent for a moment, scrutinizing Mark-Alem as if to assess how far he was capable of taking in the meaning of his words. Then he went on:
“The world has long recognized the importance of dreams, and the role they play in anticipating the fates of countries and of the people who govern them. You have certainly heard of the Oracle of Delphi in ancient Greece, and of the famous soothsayers of Rome, Assyria, Persia, Mongolia, and so on. Old books tell sometimes of the beneficial effects of the seers’ predictions, sometimes of the penalties incurred by those who rejected them or accepted them too late. In short, books record all the events that have ever been told of in advance, whether or not they were actually affected by the forecast. Now this long tradition undoubtedly has its own importance, but it pales into insignificance beside the operations of the Tabir Sarrail. Our imperial State is the first in the history of the whole world to have institutionalized the interpretation of dreams, and so to have brought it to such a high degree of perfection.”
Mark-Alem listened in bewilderment. He still hadn’t quite got over the previous emotions of the morning, and this matter-of-fact flood of abstruse phrases crowned all!
“The task of our Palace of Dreams, which was created directly by the reigning Sultan, is to classify and examine not the isolated dreams of certain individuals — such as those who in the past were for one reason or another granted the privilege, and who in practice enjoyed the monopoly, of prediction through interpretation of divine omens — but the Tabir as a whole: in other words, all the dreams of all citizens without exception. This is a vast enterprise, beside which the oracles of Delphi and the predictions of all the hordes of prophets and magicians in the past are derisory. The idea behind the Sovereign’s creation of the Tabir is that Allah looses a forewarning dream on the world as casually as He unleashes a flash of lightning or draws a rainbow or suddenly sends a comet close to us, drawn from the mysterious depths of the Universe. He dispatches a signal to the earth without bothering about where it will land; He is too far away to be concerned with such details. It is up to us to find out where the dream has come to earth - to flush it out from among millions, billions of others, as one might look for a pearl lost in the desert. For the interpretation of that dream, fallen like a stray spark into the brain of one out of millions of sleepers, may help to save the country or its Sovereign from disaster; may help to avert war or plague or to create new ideas.”
For Kadare Tabir Sarrail was an allegory of corrupt and oppressive communist government of Albania. But I myself could not shake a feeling that social networks are Tabir Sarrail of today - gigantic funnels collecting and distilling Tabir of the world.
Akutagawa Ryunosuke in translations by Natalia Feldman
You probably heard about Rashōmon a famous film by Akira Kurosava, which presents that same murder story through eyes of four participants (dead samurai himself, his wife, bandit and a woodcutter). Their accounts are contradictory - obscured by lies and desire to present best versions of themselves - and the truth remains hidden as a result. Rashōmon was largely based on the short story In a Grove by Akutagawa Ryunosuke
I always liked the presentation device behind Rashōmon - so I decided to read the source from which it originated. I was not disappointed. I am sure I miss a lot of context (familiarity with Japanese culture and history) required to trully appreciate Akutagawa’s writing, but nevertheless, I managed to greatly enjoy this collection of short stories. After all some truths are universal.
In killing, I use the sword I wear at my side. Am I the only one who kills people? You, you don’t use your swords. You kill people with your power, with your money. Sometimes you kill them on the pretext of working for their good. It’s true they don’t bleed. They are in the best of health, but all the same you’ve killed them. It’s hard to say who is a greater sinner, you or me.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
— by Robert M. Pirsig 〈goodreads〉
You see things vacationing on a motorcycle in a way that is completely different from any other. In a car you’re always in a compartment, and because you’re used to it you don’t realize that through that car window everything you see is just more TV. You’re a passive observer and it is all moving by you boringly in a frame.
On a cycle the frame is gone. You’re completely in contact with it all. You’re in the scene, not just watching it anymore, and the sense of presence is overwhelming. That concrete whizzing by five inches below your foot is the real thing, the same stuff you walk on, it’s right there, so blurred you can’t focus on it, yet you can put your foot down and touch it anytime, and the whole thing, the whole experience, is never removed from immediate consciousness.
What is this book about? Dunno. You are travelling through the pages on a journey that feels endless. Occassionally you hit a golden nugget of a brilliant observation but most of the time you are tired and exhausted. And when it ends you find yourself on 101 just past Novato approaching San Francisco from the South. Hmm. Then you read Pirsig’s afterword and you feel like you have been kicked in the stomach. Life is cruel and strange sometimes.
I think as a journey this book was well worth my time. It did feel painfully redundant at times, but I found enough I could relate with to get through the painful places. I will probably return to it some day when I am older and wiser. Maybe. Not sure yet.
But to tear down a factory or to revolt against a government or to avoid repair of a motorcycle because it is a system is to attack effects rather than causes; and as long as the attack is upon effects only, no change is possible. The true system, the real system, is our present construction of systematic thought itself, rationality itself, and if a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government. There’s so much talk about the system. And so little understanding.
This quote was used in The Unaccountability Machine and that's what made me finally read ZAMM, which was patiently standing on the bookshelf for a while
Grades really cover up failure to teach. A bad instructor can go through an entire quarter leaving absolutely nothing memorable in the minds of his class, curve out the scores on an irrelevant test, and leave the impression that some have learned and some have not. But if the grades are removed the class is forced to wonder each day what it’s really learning. The questions, What’s being taught? What’s the goal? How do the lectures and assignments accomplish the goal? become ominous. The removal of grades exposes a huge and frightening vacuum.
Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire. The reality of your own nature should determine the speed. If you become restless, speed up. If you become winded, slow down. You climb the mountain in an equilibrium between restlessness and exhaustion. Then, when you’re no longer thinking ahead, each footstep isn’t just a means to an end but a unique event in itself. This leaf has jagged edges. This rock looks loose. From this place the snow is less visible, even though closer. These are things you should notice anyway. To live only for some future goal is shallow. It’s the sides of the mountain which sustain life, not the top. Here’s where things grow.
As I understand it Pirsig uses mountain climbing as a metaphor to way of living - I personally found it entertaining to think about it even narrower: as a metaphor to programming.
You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It’s easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally. That’s the way all the experts do it. The making of a painting or the fixing of a motorcycle isn’t separate from the rest of your existence. If you’re a sloppy thinker the six days of the week you aren’t working on your machine, what trap avoidances, what gimmicks, can make you all of a sudden sharp on the seventh? It all goes together.
But if you’re a sloppy thinker six days a week and you really try to be sharp on the seventh, then maybe the next six days aren’t going to be quite as sloppy as the preceding six. What I’m trying to come up with on these gumption traps I guess, is shortcuts to living right.
The real cycle you’re working on is a cycle called yourself. The machine that appears to be “out there” and the person that appears to be “in here” are not two separate things. They grow toward Quality or fall away from Quality together.
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