Content here is by Michael Still, mikal@stillhq.com.
This book triggered my weak spot. There I was wandering in a book store and it caught my eye. The combination of the promise of instant expertise and and interesting topic area was too much for my already notably poor impulse control with books and a purchase was made. Covering from our distant origins from…
I bought this book because Amazon recommended it to me and it got good reviews. There’s a lesson there somewhere. You see, I didn’t realise when I bought it that the book is self published, and its a little bit… awkward. Its little things, like clearly needing an editorial pass to make the phrasing flow…
I was quite excited when this book arrived. It’s a bit old (early 2000s) and therefore a bit hard to find, so when Amazon randomly had a “new” copy I snapped it up. This copy is definitely unread, but yet still yellowed with time and the binding is a bit sad. Project Orion is the…
So David at work has been talking about this book quite a lot recently, and that meant I had to read it despite the failure of Debugging to delight me. Interestingly, the book starts by telling the story of the hard disk industry, which aligns well with Chip War’s approach of telling the story of…
I think it was Hugh who recommended this book. I’m greatful as it was an excellent read and definitely didn’t make me duck over to eBay to buy an Intel 4004 chip set to play with. The book uses the backdrop of our current struggles to retain supremacy in high tech manufacturing versus an ambitious…
Hugh Howey is a master of suspense and as a result I found this book hard to read — it’s clear things are off the rails and characters I care about are going to get harmed (another Howey trademark it seems), but you just have to keep on marching through. As a result I found…
With Cisco announcing that they no longer need 12% of their staff this calendar year (5% in February, and another 7% in September), I am left wondering what is so terribly wrong with American Capitalism. Interestingly at about the same time someone recommended I read this book, so here we are — seeking to understand…
One of the other architects at work was running a reading group for our North American comrades, and I felt left out so I figured I may as well just pick up the book to see what the deal was. This book is a bit old, and was written at the time to try and…
I have been paid money to write Python code since about 2006, so I figured it was probably time that I should understand some of the inner workings of Python. I therefore picked up two books on the topic, this one being the first of the two. This book to be honest isn’t completely what…
This is the second book in the Silo series, following on the Wool, which I recently read. I think to a certain extend this book is better than the first one — I certainly found it compelling. An excellent read that explains how the universe described in Wool came to be, but yet also sets…