The months main into re:Invent are thrilling (and infrequently exhausting). I spend most of my time doing analysis, assembly with good engineers, and creating tales to share with you on stage. It’s fantastic. But it surely doesn’t go away me with a lot time to learn solely for pleasure.
So, within the weeks that observe re:Invent, I attempt to make time to work via the ever-growing pile of books accumulating on my nightstand and all through my workplace. It’s a dropping battle. Then once more, when was it ever value doing one thing simple?
Right here’s a brief listing of issues I’ve began, completed, and lately added to the pile…
- An important factor I’ve learn lately was Proper/Flawed: How Expertise Transforms Our Ethics by Juan Enriquez. It clearly lays out how our ethics and morals change below the affect of know-how in a reasonably brief period of time. For instance, utilizing gene enhancing know-how akin to CRISPR to change a baby’s genome could also be unethical proper now, however our grandchildren would possibly really feel in a different way, realizing that we might have eliminated or edited a gene identified to trigger breast most cancers. At a time of maximum polarization, this guide challenges us to consider how shortly mainstream opinions can shift and why.
- In mild of latest election outcomes worldwide, and the upcoming presidential race in the USA, I made a decision to re-read The Age of American Unreason in a Tradition of Lies by Susan Jacoby. It offers wonderful historic perception into how politics and the politicians that signify us have shifted away from rational and mental debate to who can shout the loudest. It’s fairly startling to see how a lot public language has devolved up to now few a long time. If this can be a subject you’re taken with, I urge you to learn Douglas Hofstadter’s 1964 Anti-Intellectualism in American Life.
- I lastly had an opportunity to complete Down and Out in Paradise: The Lifetime of Anthony Bourdain by Charles Leerhsen. As a fellow world traveler, with an identical view of how you can stay, I’ve all the time been impressed by Bourdain’s storytelling skills. He was an empathetic narrator that centered on individuals and their experiences. This guide is concerning the man behind the tales that helped deliver these narratives to life.
- As a lot of you already know, I’m a lifelong AFC Ajax supporter, so I actually loved Zlatan Ibrahimovic’s biography Adrenaline: My Untold Tales. Zlatan began his profession at Ajax and his spotlight reel from these days will do extra justice than my phrases can:
- I picked up Atlas van een bezette stad 1940-1945 by Bianca Stigter, which covers the German occupation of Amsterdam within the type of an illustrated Atlas. It’s mind-blowing to see the ways in which the Nazi occupation nonetheless haunts the town. The guide is in Dutch (sorry for now to my English readers), nevertheless it was tailored right into a four-hour lengthy documentary by Stigter’s associate Steve McQueen, known as “Occupied Metropolis” which debuted at Cannes final 12 months.
- I began studying Rust for Rustaceans: Idiomatic Programming of Skilled Builders by John Gjengset, nevertheless it’s a bit extra superior than I would like in the meanwhile, so I picked Command-line Rust: A Mission-based Primer for Writing Rust CLIs by Ken Youens-Clark and it appears to be like promising to this point. I’ll present an replace as I progress.
- Only for enjoyable, I purchased the fourth guide in John Burdett’s Sonchai Jitpleecheep sequence: The Godfather of Kathmandu. You probably have ever spent any prolonged time frame in Bangkok, you’ll take pleasure in this sequence. The writing is completely good. I’m not completed but, however to this point, it’s nearly as good because the earlier three books.
- The very last thing I’ll go away you with is a paper I lately learn from the Netflix Expertise Weblog, “Rebuilding Netflix Video Processing Pipeline with Microservices” by Liwei Guo, Anush Moorthy, Li-Heng Chen, Vinicius Carvalho, Aditya Mavlankar, Agata Opalach, Adithya Prakash, Kyle Swanson, Jessica Tweneboah, Subbu Venkatrav, Lishan Zhu — It goes into element about rebuilding their video processing pipeline on their microservice-based platform Cosmos.
If there’s one thing that you just’ve learn or are studying that you just’d advocate, let me know on Twitter or LinkedIn.
