
The months main into re:Invent are thrilling (and sometimes exhausting). I spend most of my time doing analysis, assembly with good engineers, and growing tales to share with you on stage. It’s fantastic. But it surely doesn’t go away me with a lot time to learn completely for pleasure.
So, within the weeks that observe re:Invent, I attempt to make time to work by 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 checklist of issues I’ve began, completed, and not too long ago added to the pile…
- A very powerful factor I’ve learn not too long ago was Right/Wrong: How Technology Transforms Our Ethics by Juan Enriquez. It clearly lays out how our ethics and morals change underneath the affect of know-how in a reasonably quick 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 may really feel otherwise, figuring out that we may have eliminated or edited a gene recognized to trigger breast most cancers. At a time of utmost polarization, this guide challenges us to consider how rapidly mainstream opinions can shift and why.
- In mild of current election outcomes worldwide, and the upcoming presidential race in america, I made a decision to re-read The Age of American Unreason in a Culture 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 this can be a matter 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 Life of Anthony Bourdain by Charles Leerhsen. As a fellow world traveler, with the same view of how you can dwell, I’ve at all times been impressed by Bourdain’s storytelling talents. He was an empathetic narrator that targeted on folks and their experiences. This guide is concerning the man behind the tales that helped carry 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 Stories. 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), but it surely was tailored right into a four-hour lengthy documentary by Stigter’s associate Steve McQueen, known as “Occupied City” which debuted at Cannes final yr.
- I began studying Rust for Rustaceans: Idiomatic Programming of Experienced Developers by John Gjengset, but it surely’s a bit extra superior than I would like in the mean time, so I picked Command-line Rust: A Project-based Primer for Writing Rust CLIs by Ken Youens-Clark and it seems promising thus far. I’ll present an replace as I progress.
- Only for enjoyable, I purchased the fourth guide in John Burdett’s Sonchai Jitpleecheep collection: The Godfather of Kathmandu. You probably have ever spent any prolonged time frame in Bangkok, you’ll take pleasure in this collection. The writing is completely good. I’m not completed but, however thus far, it’s pretty much as good because the earlier three books.
- The very last thing I’ll go away you with is a paper I not too long ago 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 simply’ve learn or are studying that you simply’d suggest, let me know on Twitter or LinkedIn.