Watch your thoughts. They become words. Watch your words. They become deeds. Watch your deeds. They become habits. Watch your habits. They become character. Character is everything.
My 2017 reading challenge
Last year I decided that I wanted to read more. So I set myself a goal to read 53 books in one year. I failed (That’s a recurring theme).
During the challenge, that started the 31st of October 2016, I managed to read ~25 books. Here they are:
- Intercom on Product Management Great book
- Docker for Developers meh
- Liminal Thinking: Create the Change You Want by Changing the Way You Think I need to read this again
- 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know: Collective Wisdom from the Experts Lot of insights
- Modernizing Legacy Applications in PHP Really well written
- Digital Marketing For Dummies I don’t usually read marketing books, but this is good
- La luna e i falò A Masterpiece
- Alice in Wonderland A classic
- Contagious: Why Things Catch On You need to read this!
- Warren Buffett Style: Regola n.1 non perdere mai denaro What was I thinking? Awful
- Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action Maybe I need to re-read this. I didn’t like it
- The Time Machine Wow!
- The War of the Worlds Slow, but good
- Demystifying Public Speaking A good piece on the topic
- The Digital Photography Book 1 Sometime you need to move on
- Blockchain Basics: A Non-Technical Introduction in 25 Steps To understand what was it all about
- The Principles of Successful Freelancing I had the idea to start freelancing
- The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom CC Book for Digital Photographers I like retouching photos
- The Minimalist Photographer And also travel light
- The Best of The Digital Photography Book Series Same as above
- Travel and Street Photography: From Snapshots to Great Shots And travel
- Beyond Legacy Code A nice read
- Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests If you’re into testing, you should read this book
- A Common-Sense Guide to Data Structures and Algorithms: Level Up Your Core Programming Skills Very basic, but if you need an introduction, it’s perfect
- The Little Black Book of Decision Making: Making Complex Decisions with Confidence in a Fast-Moving World I really loved this book: it’s packed with knowledge
So I’ve read less than half my goal but, jokes aside, I don’t consider it a failure. I’ve read more in 2017 than in the previous two years!
Tips to read more
Social media has taken a toll on everyone. I discovered myself more than I like to admit browsing endlessly streams of jokes, links, articles (I’ll just save it and read it later…yeah sure), tweets, photos and so on. But I also discovered that I could just stop. I trained myself to stop being a social media zombie and read instead.
Everyone imagines that to read you have to be sitting on your favorite couch, beside a fireplace, drinking hot chocolate while outside the snow falls covering the ground. How romantic. Yes, there are situations like this and they happen in the movies. We live in the harsh reality, we should be guerrilla readers.
The trick is: read everywhere, even if a single page or paragraph. In a queue? Read. Waiting for the doctor? Read. Stuck in traffic? Listen to an audiobook. To the dentist? Run! 😀
My friends know that I swear by Safari Books Online: the thing that I like the most is that it enables me to access and download all the books on my smartphone, so that I don’t need to bring with me yet another device (I’m looking at you, Kindle. It was nice, but you know that it never worked between us)
2018 edition
So have I stopped? Of course not. But only stupids don’t learn from their mistakes.
So for this year I’ve decided to start from January to December (so that I can track my results in Goodreads better). And since I don’t think that I’ll be able to read a book a week, I’ve decreased the target to 40 books. That’s a bit more than last year.
So, are you up to a challenge? Connect with me on Goodreads
The Design of Everyday Things
This is one of the best books I’ve ever read.
Even if I’m not a designer by trade, I’ve been always curious about the processes behind it. And this book helped me understand a lot about how things are designed and how the design is dependent on the interaction with people using an object.
I liked the first and the last chapters the most: the first because it showed common examples of good and bad design, the latter because it explained how to apply all the concepts from the book in a real context.
Anyway, if you’re involved in product making at any level, you should definitely read this book, even if you skip some paragraphs in the middle chapters.
Which country does the most good for the world?
We clearly need to find ways of encouraging countries to start working together a little bit better. And why won't they do that? Why is it that our leaders still persist in looking inwards?
Family reunion
Donna mia
Is it possible to do negative work?
That is far from the truth. Not all developers will bring positive value to your team. I understand the pressure of tight timelines, but hiring in desperation won’t solve that problem. It’ll make it worse. Bad developers will not only slow you down, but they can cause your great developers to leave your company. You will be even further behind on your project than if you hadn’t hired anyone.
Estonia is leading our future
Perhaps only a place that started over from scratch in 1991 could reimagine the idea of a country. As I watch the Starship robots maneuver across the company’s office in Tallinn, CEO Heinla says he believes Estonians, after decades of living under Soviet rule, were uniquely suited to creating new ways of doing things, including how to run a government.
Is America anti-innovation?
It’s hard to imagine a more irrational way to organize society. Capitalism prides itself on allocating resources well – if it creates inequality, its defenders argue, at least it also creates growth. Increasingly, that’s no longer the case. In its infinite wisdom, capitalism is eating itself alive. A saner system would recognize that innovation is too precious to leave to the private sector and that capitalism, like all utopian projects, works better in theory than in practice.
Read on: America has become so anti-innovation – it’s economic suicide
AI Playbook
We’ve written the survey specifically as a starting place for business and technical people just beginning their own journeys with artificial intelligence and are teasing apart what’s real from what’s hype.
We assume you are involved in creating, managing, or green lighting software and want to understand how AI can give your software super powers
Read on: A 16 Z AI Playbook