My favorite books et al. in 2019
I learned a lot in 2019, probably more than the previous two years combined. I believe that’s mostly because 2019 is my first full calendar year as a parent and as an engineering manager, both of which demand a lot of learning in the early days for survival. It is also partly due to compounding over the previous years’ learnings. I also learned a lot from my family, some of my friends, co-workers and awesome people on Twitter.
These are my favorite resources that I learned from in 2019
Books
Paul Graham’s essays
Technically not a book, I downloaded all the essays into an epub (thanks to this person for making it easily available) and read most of them like I read a book. A few among many that I loved are Life is short, wisdom, The Top Idea in your mind, How to lose time and money, Identity, Writing and Speaking
Bed of Procrustes by Nassim Taleb
I also re-read most of Antifragile, read parts of the other books in the Incerto series. Taleb’s books are not so easy to read IMO, but they are all great, full of wisdom.
The Natural Baby Sleep Solution by Polly Moore
A friend recommended this to me. Stuff I learned from this book was more useful for me in practice than what I learned from any other book this year. Understanding the importance of sleep for babies and some techniques to help them get enough rest really changed my life as a full-time parent during my parental leave.
Why we sleep by Matthew Walker
I got curious to learn more about sleep and came across this excellent book.
Atomic Habits by James Clear
How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big by Scott Adams
Einstein: His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson
Seven Brief Lessons on Physics by Carlo Rovelli
The Richest Man in Babylon by George S. Clason
A small, fun book about finance with stories set in ancient Babylon. The lessons are timeless.
Spiritual Enlightenment: The Damnedest Thing by Jed McKenna
The Book of Life by Jiddu Krishnamurti
The hard thing about hard things by Ben Horowitz
An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management by Will Larson
Radical Candor by Kim Scott
Articles
Jay Kreps’s blog posts on Streaming/Kafka/software in general: The Log, Every company is becoming software, Introducing ksqlDB, Questioning the lambda architecture
I am sure there are many more I loved and learned great stuff from that I cannot recollect.
Podcasts
Naval’s How to Get Rich Series, Naval on Joe Rogan experience
Products
I started using these awesome products this year. Though they are not resources I consumed for learning, they definitely helped increase my learning pace, productivity.
Notion: I am not a power user yet. This product might be the note-keeping app I’ve been looking for forever.
