121–130 of 295 posts
I have a terrible problem with people recommending books that „changed their whatever”. And sometimes I think that it comes from an arrogant place where people being „influenced” by books is a bad place. But I do understand that sometimes books can change the way one thinks about things, and it makes sense to make a list of those. For me, there are books that had a negative impact on my work. The GoF book is one such…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Or books on fundamentals… Abelson, Sussman's Structure Interpretation of Computer Programs also good recommend - helps show that whilst it's not magic, fact everything still works is magical
This has sat on my shelf for my ten year career and I've never read it. Are there any up-to-date resources to help approach the text?
I read The Phoenix Project a while ago, and it was pretty good to understand what DevSecOps is supposed to mean. It also convinced me that simpler processes are better and you add layers to those simple processes only if they are necessary. Sometimes you should accept that a more complex process might help track metrics better or might be logically better, but the simpler process is easier for everyone to grok and in…
The thing that changed my career as a software engineer, in terms of seniority & remuneration by time and effort, was by changing my efforts from learning arbitrary tech to learning the domain I worked in. Asking useful domain-related questions gets you noticed in stand ups and helps you write the right code. I work in fintech so the best bang for my buck I’ve had was reading an entry level cert in investment finance…
Exactly. Programming is ultimately pretty simple. The hard part is the specific domain knowledge of the business.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Or books on fundamentals… Abelson, Sussman's Structure Interpretation of Computer Programs also good recommend - helps show that whilst it's not magic, fact everything still works is magical
This has sat on my shelf for my ten year career and I've never read it. Are there any up-to-date resources to help approach the text?
1. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/19546115/which-lang-pack... 2. https://eli.thegreenplace.net/2007/06/19/introducing-the-sic...
The thing that changed my career as a software engineer, in terms of seniority & remuneration by time and effort, was by changing my efforts from learning arbitrary tech to learning the domain I worked in. Asking useful domain-related questions gets you noticed in stand ups and helps you write the right code. I work in fintech so the best bang for my buck I’ve had was reading an entry level cert in investment finance…
As a consequence if one changes jobs say every 2-3 years (different domains) then they become generalist engineers.
In my experience one has to spend 10-12 months at a company to pick up a domain by being deliberate at it. It may look like a big investment but the payoff will be significant once they have sufficient context in their head.
I read The Phoenix Project a while ago, and it was pretty good to understand what DevSecOps is supposed to mean. It also convinced me that simpler processes are better and you add layers to those simple processes only if they are necessary. Sometimes you should accept that a more complex process might help track metrics better or might be logically better, but the simpler process is easier for everyone to grok and in…
I honestly found the writing in the Phoenix Project painful, but I'm surprised you're the only one to mention it since I've heard it come up a fair bit elsewhere. I think it's probably more popular in the more traditional IT world than HN's typical audience.
For nonfiction books I mostly put myself in the mindset of learning or conceptualizing the content in a more abstract way, like building a mind map.
For fiction, I picture the story like a movie, which distracts me from bad writing, so this book hit that sweet spot for me, personally, where I could imagine the world and the events but also conceptualize the abstract content.
I actually wish I could read more technical books that have fiction and technical concepts mixed like that!
Edit: Also, for as much as people complain about DevOps here, I'm amazed so few people have read this book. It's literally the book that invented DevOps as a term, right?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I had this exact problem. I set a single New Years Resolution goal to build this muscle: 12 books in this year. I’ve read 22 now. What compels me to keep reading is the Reading Insights Streak feature in Kindle. It’s like a little reminder I can always check on to see if I’ve read today or not.
It seems like if you need to remind yourself if you’ve read today or not you aren’t doing “deep reading”. Schopenhauer’s essay “On Reading” is instructive here. He recommends reading fewer books but going deeper into them.
"The book is strictly about career development and it has a lot of insights ..."
"The book is filled with classic and fresh anecdotes, thoughtful examples, ..."
"This book is amazing to understand the corporate structure and how you should behave ..."
These generic praises aren't good enough to overcome my threshold of interest, so to speak. A better way, if I'd suggest, is to pick a choice quote from the books. Quotes can be hit and miss, but when they click, it can pique the reader's interest in a much more acute way.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Or books on fundamentals… Abelson, Sussman's Structure Interpretation of Computer Programs also good recommend - helps show that whilst it's not magic, fact everything still works is magical
This has sat on my shelf for my ten year career and I've never read it. Are there any up-to-date resources to help approach the text?