A friend of mine asked on Facebook, what books should he read, that others found great from last year.

And so here are mine. This isn’t in any particular order.

The Expanse by James S. A. Corey

This is a great series on great power politics written in a Game of Thrones style. The first set of books feel too much like a dungeon and dragons adventure, the latter set of books really hit their stride.

Imperial by Thomas Vollman

Bought it 10 years ago, finally started to read it this year. OMFG. This is the best book I have read since Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables. The French version, because the one in English is unreadable.

Barbarian Days: A surfing life by William Finnegan.

This book made me regret not learning to surf 15 years ago when I first went to Hawaii. A co-worker of mine and I have agreed to go get a lesson in Santa Cruz because we both had the same regrets.

Master Switch and the Attention Merchants by Tim Wu.

Advertising and communication lines are tied at the hip. The original advertisers pandered to poor taste to make money. The original owner of the network, ATT and the radio companies, controlled what could and could not be done, delaying television for almost a decade.

Circe by Madeleine Miller

She wrote Achilles Heel. And this is an incredible book. She is able to capture the magic and faith and belief system of the Ancient Greeks from a unique perspective, a powerless nymph. The powerless nymph, however, acquires power through science (aka medicine) and becomes powerful.

Great book. My favorite part is the Goddess Athena.

The Marne, 1914: The Opening of World War I and the Battle That Changed the World by Herman Hedwig.

Hedwig’s book has excruciating details about every twist and turn of every unit. But if you step back, you see that this was the defining moment of the 20th century. The Germany Army was the 19th-century army. It was cabal of kings and queens of Germany with very poor co-ordination. The French Army was the first 20th-century army under the firm grip of a single general. At the Marne, the feudal nature of the 19th century ends, and the totalitarian era begins. After the defeat, the German army gets re-organized under Ludendorf, and everything we recall happens. The horrors of the 20th began with the French victory at the Marne.

The other thing the book makes clear, even if it does it in a backhanded way, is that even if Paris had been conquered, the French were not done, and the Germans were exhausted. There was no path to victory.

I’m Greek. And I grew up in Montreal and Athens.

Growing up, I knew one black kid. And he was my first friend. And slavery was always bad.

And I was a huge Dungeons and Dragons fan.

As a Greek and kid who did well in science, I knew that if you stayed in the sun, you were this color

And if you stayed out of the sun, you were this color.

And so it was very confusing why the elves that were good and lived in the sun were this color:

And the evil elves that lived underground were this color: 

For a Greek kid, that had no understanding of the evil racial history of the United States, this was very confusing.

If you lived in the sun, you were tanned. People who were white and did not tan were this color:

As I understood the world, people who lived in sunny climates tanned and were olive skinned, or darker. People who lived in climates in climates that were not sunny were very white and turned bright red.

And I stopped playing Dungeons and Dragons after I left Brown University. And I forgot about the Drow and their peculiar skin color.

And I didn’t give it a moment’s notice until I started playing with my six-year-old son. And he asked what a Drow is? And I said, well there are two kinds of elves. The good elves that are white and the evil elves that live underground and...

And I stopped talking. What was a mystery as a child, was sadly so clear as an adult. Of course, the good guys were white, and the bad guys were black.

And the blatant racism in the description of the Drow and Elves was evident.

And so I told Nick, a different story. The Drow because they live underground, are albino white and the elves that live above ground are olive-skinned and tanned.

 

 

Whe I started my career, my first boss on my first day told another engineer:

Are you doing anything useful or are you just breathing my air?

He then later turned to me and informed me that there was this five year rule. And I asked what is the five year rule?

And he said:

You keep your mouth shut for five years.

And so I learned to model that behavior. I thought being a technology leader meant being a dick.

And then I met Scott Schoenthal at NetApp and learned that you could be a polite civil and compassionate leader. That being nice was a better way to lead. That ripping people to shreds, publicly shaming them, calling them names wasn’t the only way you could get your point across.

I didn’t always model my behavior after Scott – Lord knows how many rants I produced in this life …but I am glad I learned about that other way to lead.

As an engineer it’s easy to see the cantankerous asshole email and say: I want to the guy who writes that email. Writing that email means you arrived. It means you are the man.

Except it doesn’t. It means you are an asshole. You are reveling in your ability to abuse someone who is defenseless. You are modeling poor behavior.

Just Don’t Do It.

Scott Schoenthal was the first person to show me another way….

When I was an aspiring software engineer at my first job at SGI in 1996, I asked my friend and mentor why a specific kernel debugger wasn’t working.

He gave me an answer, but even then my unwillingness to be satisfied with a curt answer was – well – annoying. He looked at me as I tried to get a more interesting answer than just – well the configuration didn’t work and realized that he needed to get on with his life than answer one more annoying question from this freshly minted new grad.

His response to my: well okay but really what was going what was the fundamental issue?

His answer was legendary:

Because some of the 1’s that should have been 1’s were 0’s and some of the 0’s that should have been 0’s were 1’s

I love the answer. It was a brush off, but at the same time was deeply insightful. At the end of the day the reason software doesn’t work can be reduced to a string of 1’s and 0’s that aren’t correct.

And many years later my son repeated this to me when I asked his mom why the database wasn’t working:

Apparently some sayings endure.

Over the weekend, I decided to finally wrest control from the crap in my Yahoo Inbox. Because of my willingness to sign up for any service, my inbox had escalated from a small number of emails to over 18k unread emails since 2009!

Yahoo’s decision to give unlimited space made this worse, the caps on storage would periodically force me to get a handle on things, and now … well … now the Inbox could just grow and grow and grow…

Given my Inbox dates from pre 2000, more or less when yahoo mail started, this exercise filled me with wonder. Would Yahoo still be able to serve up my email? Would I find curious pauses in my email as I scanned further and further back in time? Would email just disappear? Would those emails from 1999 be gone?

Turns out that Yahoo handled my searches through time wonderfully. And more importantly I was able to find some memorable old emails from my friends from almost 15 years ago.

My inbox was probably initially served off of the original infrastructure that Yahoo made available to customers in the 1990’s. To see the data still being available was impressive. Being able to store and retrieve 15 years of email correctly, given the data center migrations, storage system upgrades, infrastructure upgrades, CEO turmoil is a tribute to the quality of the engineering team at Yahoo.