The months main into re:Invent are thrilling (and sometimes exhausting). I spend most of my time doing analysis, assembly with sensible engineers, and creating tales to share with you on stage. It’s fantastic. Nevertheless it 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 shedding battle. Then once more, when was it ever price doing one thing straightforward?
Right here’s a brief record of issues I’ve began, completed, and just lately added to the pile…
- An important factor I’ve learn just lately was Proper/Improper: How Know-how Transforms Our Ethics by Juan Enriquez. It clearly lays out how our ethics and morals change beneath the affect of expertise in a reasonably quick period of time. For instance, utilizing gene modifying expertise akin to CRISPR to change a toddler’s genome could also be unethical proper now, however our grandchildren would possibly really feel in another way, figuring out that we might have eliminated or edited a gene identified to trigger breast most cancers. At a time of utmost polarization, this e book challenges us to consider how shortly mainstream opinions can shift and why.
- In gentle of current 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 supplies superb 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 previously few a long time. If it is a subject you’re enthusiastic about, 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 the same view of methods to reside, I’ve all the time been impressed by Bourdain’s storytelling talents. He was an empathetic narrator that targeted on individuals and their experiences. This e book is concerning the man behind the tales that helped deliver these narratives to life.
- As lots of , 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 town. The e book is in Dutch (sorry for now to my English readers), but it surely was tailored right into a four-hour lengthy documentary by Stigter’s associate Steve McQueen, referred to as “Occupied Metropolis” which debuted at Cannes final 12 months.
- I began studying Rust for Rustaceans: Idiomatic Programming of Skilled Builders by John Gjengset, but it surely’s a bit extra superior than I want in the meanwhile, so I picked Command-line Rust: A Challenge-based Primer for Writing Rust CLIs by Ken Youens-Clark and it seems to be promising to date. I’ll present an replace as I progress.
- Only for enjoyable, I purchased the fourth e book in John Burdett’s Sonchai Jitpleecheep sequence: The Godfather of Kathmandu. When you’ve got ever spent any prolonged time frame in Bangkok, you’ll get pleasure from this sequence. The writing is completely sensible. I’m not completed but, however to date, it’s nearly as good because the earlier three books.
- The very last thing I’ll go away you with is a paper I just lately learn from the Netflix Know-how 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.
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