books
Books
A list of books I’ve read and recommend 📚 For each book, I’ll say a few words about the things that caught my attention and why I liked it.
Labels:
🤖 - Related to software development
📚 - Literature and novels (fiction)
🌎 - General knowledge books, including phylosophy, anthropology and other “real world things”
2024
🤖 Tidy First?: A Personal Exercise in Empirical Software Design (Kent Back): Fantastic book compiling years of learning on software design, and how that can be leveraged to decrease the cost of building software.
2023
🌎 The Great Mental Models Volume 3: Systems and Mathematics: Third book of the series, excellent and meaningful content as always. It approaches several math/systems concepts really useful for any software engineering.
🤖 The Staff Engineer’s Path: A Guide for Individual Contributors Navigating Growth and Change (Tanya Reilly): The Staff engineer role is somewhat new in the industry and this book beautifully maps all the complexity involved in the role.
🌎 It Was the Best of Sentences, It Was the Worst of Sentences: A Writer’s Guide to Crafting Killer Sentences (June Casagrande): This book explains some grammar concepts with the goal of improving wrtiten communication and tweaking sentences to get your point accross effectively. Important knowledge for any person working remotely and relying on async communications to get the job done.
2022
🤖 How to Lie with Statistics (Darrell Huff): Excellent book to get a better understanding on statitics concepts. This book was published in 1954, but remains as relevant as ever.
🌎 The Great Mental Models Volume 2: Physics, Chemistry and Biology (Shane Parrish): Second edition of this marvelous book. Really useful to fill some knowledge gaps and understand how the world works.
🌎 Humankind - A Hopeful History (Rutger Bregman): This book covers several aspects of sociology, philosophy and psychology in a way that make us more hopeful with human nature. It’s a very interesting read with many real life stories.
🌎 A Little History of Philosophy (Nigel Warburton): I actually started reading this many years ago, but ended up forgetting about it 😅 So this year after reading Humankind (mentioned above) I felt it was a good time to finish it and get more context of what I had just read. The book covers briefly many philosophers and schools of thought.
🌎 Napoleon’s Buttons (Penny le Couteur): This is a book about how chemistry and certain molecules changed the course of history. I don’t know much about chemistry, but I found the stories very interesting and I could even understand some of the more detailed chemistry stuff.
🌎 The Stoic Challenge: A Philosopher’s Guide to Becoming Tougher, Calmer, and More Resilient (William Irvine): Great book on Stoicism, combining a 2 thousand year old philosophy with the modern findings in psychology. Curiously, I think Stoicism has a lot to do with Site Reliability Engineering (by Google), specially in the way they recommend we deal with incidents.
📚 The Alienist (Machado de Assis): Must read, one of the classics by a Brazilian author, written in the nineteenth century, it discusses the psychology of insanity with a very ironic taste and beautiful language.
📚 Menino do Mato (Manoel de Barros): One of the last books by Manoel de Barros, a Brazilian author, this book delivers the style of the author in a very mature and refined way. The story is inspired by the childhood of the author as he tries to capture the world through the eyes of this boy, who seeks to understand and explain the world. Beautiful book!
🤖 Fluent Python (Luciano Ramalho): I also started this one over a year ago, but have just finished it in the beginning of the year. Must read for any python developers seeking to improve from the basics to intermediate and advanced.
🤖 Desconstruindo a web - As tecnologias por trás de uma requisição (Willian Molinari): Great book about all the steps involved in a request to a web server. It provides detailed insights about how things works from the operating system to the web application.
2021
🌎 The Great Mental Models Volume 1: General Thinking Concepts (Shane Parrish): Excellent book about using multidisciplinary thinking concepts to solve real world problems.
🌎 Start with Why (Simon Sinek): An inspiring book about innovation, motivation and purpose. It also combines some aspects of human biology/nature and explains how that plays out in our relationships. It also contains many interesting stories on how Apple and other companies “started with why” and were able to innovate in their fields.
📚 To kill a mockingbird (Harper Lee): A north american classic, the story is beautiful and yet heartbreaking. It takes place in the south of the United States in the beginning of the nineteenth century, discussing several aspects of rascism and social structures.
2020
🌎 Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less (Greg McKeown): Life is short and our time and energy are extremelly limited. This book helped me see and to define what’s most important in my life and focus on those things ;)
🌎 O dilema do porco-espinho: Como encarar a solidão (Leandro Karnal): This one hasn’t been translated to english yet, but it is from a contemporary brazilian philosopher. The book talks about lonileness and solitude, giving many examples of how solitude is represented in the arts (movies, books, paintings).
📚 The old man and the sea (Ernest Hemingway): Inspiring book about patience and resilience. Extremelly well written and beautiful to read.
📚 The shinning (Stephen King): One of the classics from Stephen King. It has some differences from the movie (adapted by Stanley Kubrick), but it’s worth the read if you fancy some horror stories.
2019 and before
🌎 The Power of Habit (Charles Duhigg): Great book to understand how we create our habits. For me, having such understanding is essential to build new habits and remove unwanted ones. Of course, I’m still a human, so I don’t try to be perfect at getting those habits right and I’ll have many failures. But even when things don’t go the way I expect, I can understand why it didn’t work and adjust accordingly.
🌎 Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat (Bee Wilson): Interesting book about how kitchen utensils changed over time and how that might have shaped history.
🤖 Site Reliability Engineering (Many authors at Google): The book explains how Google manages their production systems, including explanations on how to manage incidents and outages, metrics, error budgets and a lot more.
🤖 Clean Coder, The: A Code of Conduct for Professional Programmers (Bob Martin): I read this one early in my career and it was one of the best things I could’ve done for myself. This book showed me what professionalism looks like, specially in the tech industry. I was able to avoid a lot of pain in the following years thanks to this book.
📚 Frankestein (Mary Shelley): One of my favorite books of all time, written by Mary Shelley in her teens. It is an extremely beautiful and pleasant reading. About the story, I would not say the main point is about creating a monster. For me, the main thing about this book is that it delivers a rich story about abandon, solitude, justice and social responsibility.
📚 The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas (Machado de Assis): This one is in my top 2 of all time. A masterpiece written by a Brazilian author in the nineteenth century, this book has a very interesting format: the storyteller is already dead and he’s telling the story about his life. This condition makes him very ironic and unpretentious because… well, he’s already dead. The language is beaufitul to read and the flow of the book is also something that impressed me a lot.
📚 Captains of the Sands (Jorge Amado): The only thing I have to say about this book: in 1937, the Brazilian government ordered that +800 copies of the book were burned in a public space, which was a violation of the free speech.
📚 Barren Lives: Vidas Secas (Graciliano Ramos): A masterpiece in Brazilian literature. Quoting from Amazon, “A vivid chronicle of the solitary life of a peasant family in a harsh and unforgiving land, austerely told by a classic Brazilian writer.”
📚 O Cortiço (Aluísio de Azevedo): Influential Brazilian novel, the story takes place in the nineteenth century in Rio de Janeiro.
My tips and tricks for reading more
Selecting the right books for you
I’ll quote Patrick Collison’s Manifesto on Reading (CEO of Stripe). Basically, of all books, there is a set of books that are worth reading. Inside that set, we have a subset of books that are pleasant to read. The subset of books (worth reading + pleasant to read) is enourmous and certainly bigger than all the books you can read in your lifetime.
The bottom line of all of this is: if you are struggling too much to read a book, just move on to another one. Perhaps the style of the book is not necessarily for you and that’s perfectly fine. Usually, any person that reads a lot starts more books than they finish.
I also should add that perhaps it will take some time for books to become pleasant to read and we might certainly have to develop the “taste” for them. Speaking personally, depending on the period in my life I would enjoy different books at different times, which is also ok. There are many books that I know are worth reading AND pleasant to read, but I still need time to develop the ability to enjoy those certain books.
Paper books or kindle?
It depends on what works best for you. In my previous years, I spent a lot of time commuting to work/school everyday, which made Kindle a great choice for me. I could simply carry a small device and have several books available. I could also read at night in the bus, since I have a kindle paperwhite.
Kindle has its problems, too. If you are reading a book with lots of images, tables, charts, it’s really not a good deal to read on Kindle. It’s simply not built for that.
There is thing about Kindle that I like a lot: book samples. You can get a whole chapter of a book for free and see if you like it. You can get a lot of samples and only pay for the book WHEN/IF you actually read it. This is something great that allows me to try out many books without having to pay upfront.
Currently, since I have been working remotely for the past few years, I have been enjoying more paper books. It’s easier to read the foot notes and also to make my own notes in the book. It feels great!
In summary, I have been balancing the usage of kindle + paper books and it’s working great for me, since I can take advantage of the best things in each format.
Reading fiction
When reading fiction, it’s important to understand that the book is trying to take you on an experience and your attitude towards that matters a lot.
Take for example that you are reading Harry Potter. If you read the book thinking “Oh but this isn’t true, there isn’t magic in the real world”, your experience will be miserable.
My advice is: just let the story take you wherever it want to. See how it goes and judge later. 😃