Readings
the kind of stuff I’m into
Favorite books
The Origins of Political Order - Francis Fukuyama
How To Win Friends And Influence People - Dale Carnegie
1984 - George Orwell
How Asia Works - Joe Studwell
Things I’ve read
The Three-Body Problem - Cixin Liu
Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 - Cho Nam-joo
The Master of Go - Yasunari Kawabata
Tuesdays with Morrie - Mitch Albom
Thinking, Fast and Slow - Daniel Kahneman
Connected - Nicholas A. Christakis, James H. Fowler
Animal Farm - George Orwell
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality - Eliezer Yudkowsky
Code Complete - Steve McConnell
The Design of Everyday Things - Don Norman
Zero To One - Peter Thiel
Lean In - Sheryl Sandberg
The PhD Grind - Philip Guo
Steve Jobs - Walter Isaacson
Creativity, Inc - Ed Catmull
Freakonomics - Stephen J. Dubner, Steven Levitt
The Tipping Point - Malcolm Gladwell
The Charisma Myth - Olivia Fox Cabane
Who Gets What – and Why - Alvin E. Roth
Liar’s Poker - Michael Lewis
Flash Boys - Michael Lewis
Flash Boys: Not so Fast - Peter Kovac
The New Confessions of an Economic Hit Man - John Perkins
The Motivation Hacker - Nick Winter
Strangers in Their Own Land - Arlie Russell Hochschild
Political Order and Political Decay - Francis Fukuyama
Sapiens - Yuval Noah Harari
We Are The Nerds - Christine Lagorio-Chafkin
The Making of Asian America: A Histroy - Erika Lee
Born a Crime - Trevor Noah
Speaking of books, back in undergrad I reviewed Mastering Leap Motion, for better or worse.
Links
Bookmarks from the internet
The Rise of Explorable Explanations: On using interactive visualizations to explain things. http://www.maartenlambrechts.be/the-rise-of-explorable-explanations/
Execution in the Kingdom of Nouns: I went through a phase of ‘OOP is king!’ once, before I discovered there were more approaches than computing than just using objects, which isn’t always the most suited tool. http://steve-yegge.blogspot.ca/2006/03/execution-in-kingdom-of-nouns.html
Privilege and inequality in Silicon Valley. “One example of a poor mindset is to minimize conflict because fucking up is costly and opportunities are hard to come by, so it’s been a challenge putting my ideas out there and defending them.” https://medium.com/tech-diversity-files/privilege-and-inequality-in-silicon-valley-92d455b66860
Demographic 2050 Destiny. Great visualization of interesting trends the world will take. http://graphics.wsj.com/2050-demographic-destiny/
John Carmack on functional languages. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PhArSujR_A
Curse of the Gifted. Talent vs Experiencehttp://www.vanadac.com/~dajhorn/novelties/ESR%20-%20Curse%20Of%20The%20Gifted.html
Intellectual are Freaks. A useful reminder in knowing what you don’t know. http://thesmartset.com/intellectuals-are-freaks/
How and Why to Granularize. One of the most important life skills is to learn how to learn, and a large part of that is knowing how to learn a difficult skill by breaking it down in subskills and mastering each in turn. It’s something you learn by playing sports, but it can also be extended as far as social effectiveness. http://lesswrong.com/lw/5p6/how_and_why_to_granularize/
The Art of the Command Line. Cool command-line tricks. https://github.com/jlevy/the-art-of-command-line
Parable of the Polygons. A GREAT illustration of how social segregation tends to naturally happen as a result of each person optimizing even slightly towards their social environment preferences. http://ncase.me/polygons/
Why Learning to Code is So Damn Hard. A relatable, well-written piece on the path that many software developers go through in their career. https://www.vikingcodeschool.com/posts/why-learning-to-code-is-so-damn-hard
The Rules for Rulers. Think you can be a good world leader? No man rules alone. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs
Testyourvocab. How many English words do you know? http://testyourvocab.com/
Every Frame a Painting. A great Youtube channel on cinematography. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjFqcJQXGZ6T6sxyFB-5i6A
Nerdwriter1. Another great Youtube channel on cinematography. https://www.youtube.com/user/Nerdwriter1/videos
Classic Programmer Paintings. It’s just funny. http://classicprogrammerpaintings.com/
Unraveling the Tech Hiring Market. Offer deadlines make the whole hiring market inefficient. https://blogs.janestreet.com/unraveling/
You Don’t Know JS. A Javascript book with the rare emphasis on making sure you understand how things work, not just how to use them. https://github.com/getify/You-Dont-Know-JS
The Law of Leaky Abstractions. Why you need to have strong fundamentals. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/11/11/the-law-of-leaky-abstractions/
The Slack Notification System Flowchart. Why things are not as easy as they look. https://twitter.com/mathowie/status/837735473745289218/photo/1
Jessica Livingston Speech about YC Culture. A look into how YC built a good culture. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEp9aaQuYp4
Wendover Productions. A cool Youtube channel that explains why a bunch of stuff about everyday life are the way they are, with lots of insights. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9RM-iSvTu1uPJb8X5yp3EQ
When Monospace Fonts Aren’t: The Unicode Character Width Nightmare. A humbling post about how the simple question of font rendering is seemingly impossible to solve right. http://denisbider.blogspot.com/2015/09/when-monospace-fonts-arent-unicode.html
Silent Technical Privilege. A great post about very implicit assumptions that are really easy to take granted, about the importance of something as simple as having letting people you try things. http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2014/01/programmer_privilege_as_an_asian_male_computer_science_major_everyone_gave.html
A Tale of Two Canadas. How, even in a supposedly equalitarian country like Canada, there are a lot of differences in equality of opportunities. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/a-tale-of-two-canadas-where-you-grow-up-affects-your-adult-income/article35444594/
Blockchain Company’s Smart Contracts Were Dumb. By acclaimed financial writer Matt Levine, this article touches interesting subtle questions about the meaning of money and contracts. “Financial systems are supposed to work for humans. If the code rips off the humans, something has gone wrong.” https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-06-17/blockchain-company-s-smart-contracts-were-dumb
State of JS. Comprehensive survey of web frontend trends, very good work by the authors. https://stateofjs.com/
Why do Game Developers Prefer Windows?. An insider look into the history of the OpenGL vs DirectX battles, and how it was influenced by politics and the development of hardware. https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/60544/why-do-game-developers-prefer-windows
Investigating the Potential for Miscommunication Using Emoji. Having emoji’s doesn’t solve the potential for miscommunication of emotions over text. https://grouplens.org/blog/investigating-the-potential-for-miscommunication-using-emoji/
The Viridis Color Palette. Sometimes, small low-level details like the number of color cones in the retina is crucial to making non-misleading data visualization. https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/viridis/vignettes/intro-to-viridis.html
The Web We Have To Save. A nostalgic look on the early days of the web. Modern web is rich and very powerful, but the old web also had some desirable properties. https://medium.com/matter/the-web-we-have-to-save-2eb1fe15a426
Boiling the Ocean, Incrementally - How Style Brought Rust and Servo to Firefox. A discussion of the pragramtic decisions needed be made to achieve the monumental task of replacing a browser’s rendering engine. http://bholley.net/blog/2017/stylo.html
Psychology v.s. the Graphics Pipeline. How many cognitive psychology papers that involving timing might be wrong because of monitor refresh rates? http://scattered-thoughts.net/blog/2017/12/11/psychology-vs-the-graphics-pipeline/
Crashes, Hangs and Crazy Images By Adding Zero. GPU compilers are so incredibly buggy. I’ve ran into these bugs too. https://medium.com/@afd_icl/crashes-hangs-and-crazy-images-by-adding-zero-689d15ce922b
How Discount Brokerages Make Money. Helps understand the reality behind Robinhood which is getting so popular these days, and a lot of how money is really made in finance generally speaking. https://www.kalzumeus.com/2019/6/26/how-brokerages-make-money/
The Great Divide. How the term “front-end developper” refers to two entirely separate groups of people, and how that’s a great source of miscommunication. https://css-tricks.com/the-great-divide/
ooooops I guess we’re full-stack developers now. How abstractions and new tooling has made the “stack” shrink, and remaining developers responsible for learning the entire stack. https://full-stack.netlify.com/