I consume a lot of content and I like sharing cool stuff I find.
So, I figured I'd try and make a running list of links to things I've consumed and why I like them.
Call it link curation, call it time-wasting; whatever -- it brings me joy.
Book Archive (updated whenever I finish one)
2021
1Q84 by Haruki Murakami
In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado
Death's End by Cixin Liu
The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin
The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel
Exhalation by Ted Chiang
The Obelisk Gate by N.K. Jemisin
The Stone Sky by N.K. Jemisin
Haskell Programming from First Principles by Chris Allen and Julie Moronuki
Vesper Flights by Helen MacDonald
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
2020
Men without Women by Haruki Murakami
Small Great Things by Jodi Picoult
Educated by Tara Westover
Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng
Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami
The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli
Sapiens by Noah Yuval Harari
Neuromancer by William Gibson
(re-read) Little Brother by Cory Doctorow
The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu
The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu
Burning Chrome by William Gibson
Count Zero by William Gibson
Release It! by Michael T. Nygard
Consider the Lobster and Other Essays by David Foster Wallace
On Writing by Steven King
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig
Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty by Daron Acemoglu and James
A.
Robinson
Seinfeldia: How a Show About Nothing Changed Everything by Jennifer Keishin Armstrong
Dear Girls by Ali Wong
Can't Even: How Millennials became the Burnout Generation by Anne Helen Petersen
Terranauts by T.C. Boyle
The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro
Liar's Poker by Michael Lewis
The New Wilderness by Diane Cook
The Attention Merchants by Tim Wu
The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix
Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam
The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin
Hot Water Music by Charles Bukowski (this book sucked lol)
Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson
Four in the Morning by Sy Safranksy
The Neil Gaiman Reader: Selected Fiction by Neil Gaiman (loved this one!)
2019
All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
The Gene by Siddhartha Mukherjee
High Output Management by Andrew S. Grove
American Gods by Neil Gaiman
Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann
Border Songs by Jim Lynch
The Shortest Way Home by Pete Buttigieg
You Shall Know our Velocity! by Dave Eggers
Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut
REAMDE by Neal Stephenson
Redemption Road by John Hart
AI Superpowers by Kai-Fu Lee
The Overstory by Richard Powers
Pump Six and Other Stories by Paolo Bacigalupi
Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens
Deep Work by Cal Newport
Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport
The Harder They Come by TC Boyle
The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
The Great Alone by Kristin Hannah
The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
The Gift of Struggle by Bobby Herrera
My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite
Link Archive (updated weekly throughout 2020, now updated sporadically)
This is my last newsletter of 2020! I started my newsletter this year as a way to both share cool things that I'd found on the internet and as a way for me to remember what the heck I'd been reading. Now I'm 20 weeks deep and have no plans on slowing down in 2021. However, I'm not going to be posting another one for the rest of the year; I want to take some time to reflect and recharge before next year. Enjoy this week, and happy holidays!
Back on the timely release schedule! This week I read some excellent pieces, including one on reading in the meta, and I am really excited to share them. They cover the wildness in tech IPOs, interesting reads on performance and dev tooling, some papers on examining bias and approximating species diversity, and some killer nature photographer. Enjoy!
Ugh, slow again this week. I started my new role at Mercury this week and have been super fired up on my work, but I couldn't find the time or energy to put my newsletter together. I'll try and be back on my game next week! Anyway, this week I mostly had some great reads from some friends of mine in the Techwriters.dev group and some technical observations about Haskell and functional languages in general. And there were a few cultural gems this week, too.
Sorry I'm late! This week I took a road trip down the Oregon coastline with my partner and I mostly unplugged. As a result, though, I forgot to post my reading! My bad! This week, I read some great pieces on careers, a hodgepodge of technical content, and an interesting piece on the intersection of politics and big tech. Enjoy!
This week I did a lot more production than consumption; work was pretty hectic and I also wanted to finish part two of my fantasy football data science blog post (here's part one, if you want the full story). As a result, I've got fewer pieces that I read and thought about this week, and I definitely skewed more towards interesting cultural tidbits than deeply technical pieces. Enjoy!
Buncha techy content this week! I've been going really hard on trying to understand haskell better lately (for reasons that I'll disclose within a week or so!), and in addition to working on some small projects in Haskell, I've been reading a lot of articles about the language as well. It's so cool! This week also deviates from my normal behavior in that I read an enjoyed not one but TWO articles about Facebook engineering this week... as much as I find their product and business model actively duplicitous, I really can't fault their engineering chops.
This was a big week! The USA had its presidential election and while it's not officially done yet, it looks like Joe Biden has won, which is a positive development. When I woke up on Saturday morning and read the news it felt like the first time I'd woken up to good news in years. I don't have as many reads for this week because once election coverage began on Tuesday night I just kept refreshing [the open-source election tracker every few minutes alongside reading as insipid hot takes about voting trends as much as I could. It was a bad week for careful, thoughtful, reading for me. But a good week overall :)
This week the theme of my selected readings is about careers: how to succeed in your respective one, how to apply theoretical concepts in CS to a software engineering day job, and how to know when it's time to quit a typical day job. I also included a few beautiful musings on life and death. There's also a bunch of other unrelated things that run the gamut from distributed systems, hackathons at scale, and more indictments of Facebook (as per usual) :) Enjoy!
This week I have a mixed bag of pretty dense content, and other than the two podcasts and the first link I mostly skimmed the content, but many of these links are rich resources that you can continue to come back to. I recommend bookmarking any link you find interesting. Enjoy!
The list is shorter this week -- I was on vacation and kinda stayed away from tech and the internet in general as possible (I did, however, go on a lot of hikes, I read 2 books, and ate a bunch of good food!) There were still a few pieces that I read from the tech world, though, so I figured I'd share them :) They're mostly about Scala and Haskell, with a few fun pieces (including Aphyr's latest technical interview satire). Enjoy!
This week covers SaaS startups, various topics re: programming languages, and some interesting websites for thinking about online privacy (or rather, the lack thereof).
This week, I've got a bunch of cool things from Github, various posts about parsers, and some fun meditations on removing oneself from the machine. Enjoy :)
This week I have a lot of links about dystopia and type systems. If you think those topics seem discombobulated then you're correct. Welcome to my brain.
This week is mostly focused on technical content. I cover a deep dive of sled.rs, a guide on marketing languages, and a summary of distributed systems.
This week my links cover investing, commentary on communities and the impact of influencers therein, and some technical posts on code generation and the scala collections library.