August 2024 Bakery

We've got many of new subscribers this month, so some preface is in order.

I've become persuaded by the idea that we are the product on most social media apps. The thoughts and links that I would have shared on these hellsites, I now aggregate in a monthly post I call the "Bakery."

Half baked

Some written thoughts, but not enough for their own post

Put your books into a spreadsheet. Keeping your books in a series of blog posts is sub optimal. When your book data is unstructured, you are robbed of the ability to perform any type of aggregate analysis. You can't comprehensively answer questions like, what books would you recommend about software? Or, what mediocre books did you read in 2020? You can only share what you can recall or have patience to find across blog posts.

Your spreadsheet should have a few columns. A title, author, year completed, year published, rating, genre, and notes are required in my opinion. You might also add columns for subtitle, date started, date completed, and isbn. If you are the kind of person who reads books more than once, you'll need to consider how to model these data.

Google sheets has this nice new table feature that pleases me. At least the heroes who work on the greatest software of all time are resisting the rest of the company's enshitification. Yes. Google sheets is goated.

When your books are in a spreadsheet, and someone asks, what books would you recommend about software, you need only filter your spreadsheet by genre and rating.

Did you know that you can upload CSV's into ChatGPT? Skeptical? Just ask ChatGPT - "Can I upload a CSV of all the books I've read along with ratings, genres, and some other metadata so that you can start recommending books for me?" It will be all to happy to oblige. "Can you recommend my next read?" has yielded underwhelming results. But, "Do you think I'll enjoy reading X? Why or why not?" has been more interesting.

What's that? You don't like typing data into a spreadsheet? Just build a custom script to query the Google Books API for the info you find most annoying to type. I find I have to double check the publication year because the script arbitrarily picks the first book returned by the api.

Isn't this what Goodreads and The Storygraph are for? Yes.

But I've read so many / so few books. If you are worried about how long this will take, I assure you it is possible to add 484 rows in the time it takes to do a reasonable weekend project. If you are just starting your reading journey, you are in luck! No data loss.

I wish I could go back and rigorously record my reading because what you end up with is a diary of thought evolution.

Man, I gotta say, you'd be very hard-pressed to find another author of reliable weekly notes at Stripe who's going as hard as @jessespevack. These are consistently fantastic.

I wanted to share a message a co-worker on the other side of the company wrote when they forwarded my latest notes to their team.

I want to be known for going hard.

For more information about what this colleague is talking about, see my Senior engineering series #4 - Take Public Notes.

Obviously the vibes in the tech market are not great. I feel like I have noticed both and uptick in the number of recruiter emails I'm getting and also the number of people announcing they are open for work on LinkedIn. The situation is very confused.

I plotted the political podcasts I listened to this month along two axis, Authoritarian - Libertarian and Collectivism - Individualism. We can think of this exercise as my podcast political fingerprint. Now obviously I like and agree with some of these podcasts more than others, but just as I attempt to read widely so too do I work to find diverse political voices in my podcast diet.

Authoritarian-Collectivism

• Chapotraphouse
• 5-4
• Ezra Klein Show

Authoritarian-Individualism

• The Remnant
• Econtalk
• Making Sense

Libertarian-Collectivism

• Know your enemy
• If books could kill

Libertarian-Individualism

• Complex Systems (really not that political)
• Conversations with Tyler

Quarter baked

A sentence or two and a piece of content.

I'm excited to share insights from climbing the engineering ladder. I'd love you to join me at Boulder Ruby on 9/11 for a deep dive into what it means to be a senior engineer. This talk is tailored for early to mid-career devs, but will be useful to anyone looking to level up in their software engineering careers.

Boulder Ruby September 2024 Presentation Night · Luma

Join us at our monthly gathering where we present topics of interest to Rubyists and aspiring programmers. Doors open at 6:00pm, where you can hangout and…

Boulder Ruby Group

The Complex Systems podcast just launched this summer, and I highly recommend. Obviously I'm a big Patrick McKenzie fan and so far the podcast has covered sports betting, prediction markets, tech and the fourth estate, finance, and how to train traders. So far, it's a lot of really nerdy people talking about the details of their professional nerdoms.

Another podcast recommendation is Ezra Klein's interview with Tim Walz. This interview was recorded before Kamala picked him to be her vp.

Raw

Naked links.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtXhHzH40SQ

A lesson in avoiding complacency. Also a lesson in greed - look how stingy NBC is not allowing a proper embed. The Olympics hates its fans.

Systems: How the Ultra-Wealthy Think About Money - Anil Dash

A blog about making culture. Since 1999.

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