Don’t bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.

– William Faulkner

This post is a follow-up to the previous Built to Last post. In this one, I am going to record and share some learnings from this fantastic book.

According to the authors, one of the main differentiators between visionary and comparison companies is the fact that the visionary companies are embracing the “Genius of the AND”:

• Continuity AND Change
• Core Values AND Big Hairy Audacious Goals
• Stability AND Discontinuity
• Cult-like Cultures AND Idiosyncratic People
• Consistency AND Innovation
• Discipline AND Creativity
• Systematic Methods AND Experimental Approaches
• Meaning AND Achievement
• Preserve the Core AND Stimulate Progress

So, how do you preserve the core and stimulate progress at the same time? The authors suggest that there are five critical components to it that were seen across the visionary companies, which, in the words of the book authors, are:

• Big Hairy Audacious Goals (BHAGs): Commitment to challenging, audacious – and often risky – goals and projects toward which a visionary company channels its efforts (stimulates progress).
• Cult-like Cultures: Great places to work only for those who buy in to the core ideology; those who don’t fit with the ideology are ejected like a virus (preserves the core).
• Try a Lot of Stuff and Keep What Works: High levels of action and experimentation – often unplanned and undirected – that produce new and unexpected paths of progress and enable visionary companies to mimic the biological evolution of species (stimulates progress).
• Home-grown Management: Promotion from within, bringing to senior levels only those who’ve spent significant time steeped in the core ideology of the company (preserves the core).
• Good Enough Never Is: A continual process of relentless self-improvement with the aim of doing better and better, forever into the future (stimulates progress).

All of this makes a ton of sense: a visionary company becomes visionary by achieving great things and pushing the boundaries of what’s possible. This is only doable by embracing the “Genius of the AND.” Doing this is hard. To do this, the company has to put in a lot of effort, which is hard enough on its own and could be impossible without a true alignment within the company. This is what preserving the core unlocks: it allows the company to focus on its goals and avoid wasting effort on misaligned actions. Alignment also gives people within the company more freedom, including the freedom to innovate and experiment, which is crucial for progress. Then, when the company has alignment and freedom to innovate, it has to ensure that it has bold and inspiring goals, which help with both alignment and stimulating progress. And finally, it’s crucial to ensure that the company has a culture and processes that help it to keep improving and never settle for “good enough.”

There is one more essential thing that I want to mention. When applying these learnings and instilling these principles into the company, people doing this should avoid pushing these principles directly themselves. Instead, they should be building processes to instill the principles. Processes that will continue working and moving the company forward even after the people who built them are gone. As the authors put it: “Be a clock builder – an architect – not a time teller.”

Hopefully, this post gave you a better understanding of the findings presented in the “Built to Last” book. If you want more details, I highly recommend reading the book itself. It’s a great read.

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

I have finished reading the Built to Last book. And, as promised, sharing my thoughts on it in this blog post.

This book is on a whole other level compared to many other popular business books, such as Zero to One or No Rules Rules.

This book results from a multi-year research project conducted by Jim Collins and Jerry Porras. They have researched 50+ years of history of 36 different companies – 18 visionary companies and 18 comparison companies.

The purpose of the study was to compare the “gold” companies with the “silver” companies and find out what makes the “gold” companies gold. It’s important to note that all company pairs are “twin” companies that were founded in the same period, started in similar conditions and in a similar industry; both existed for quite some time.

The fact that authors have chosen really well-performing, “silver”-tier companies as comparison companies is crucial. If instead of “silver” companies, they had selected a high school soccer team, the research would have been meaningless because when the comparison of “gold” medalists with high school soccer teams would show that everything between them is different, without highlighting the key factors that make visionary companies outstanding.

Some of the companies they have researched are:

Visionary: Sony
Comparison: Kenwood

Visionary: Procter & Gamble
Comparison: Colgate

Visionary: Walt Disney
Comparison: Columbia Pictures

Visionary: 3M – I have learned a lot about 3M from this book; for example, they have invented scotch tape, post-it notes, and waterproof sandpaper
Comparison: Norton

Visionary: Motorola
Comparison: Zenith

The other companies researched in this book that piqued my interest include Ford, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Merck, Marriott, and Pfizer.

This book is an excellent inspiration for and a reminder of great self-management practices (not just from the business perspective).

Also, this book can help restore or support (depending on where you stand currently) your faith in humanity because the authors showed that all visionary companies have a purpose beyond just making money. And consistently act on it. Comparison companies – very rarely.

Highly recommend. This is one of the few books I want to keep to get back to it later. 10/10.

If you want to build a ship,
don’t drum up the people
to gather wood, divide the
work, and give orders.
Instead, teach them to yearn
for the vast and endless sea.

– Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

Last year, I read Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer’s famous Netflix book No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention, but I have never sat to write down my thoughts about it. This is me fixing that.

It’s been a while since I read it; hopefully, the bookmarks I have put in my copy of the book will help me remember the key points.

Without looking at the bookmarks, my main takeaway was how they formalized feedback giving. I like it and have implemented the same framework in the software engineers community I have created.

The gist of the framework is to give feedback constructively, helpfully, and selflessly. Indeed, it is essential to give feedback from a desire to help and never from a desire to share frustration. There is a crucial distinction between the two. It’s also very important to give feedback in a timely and continuous manner to support constant growth.

It was insightful to read about the Netflix culture and how they work. Another great thing I like about their culture is how they align everyone on the team to the same goal, and then give people the freedom to execute on that goal. Needless to say, this freedom comes with a lot of responsibility. It’s only natural.

After looking through my bookmarks, I would like to mention a few more thoughts I liked or found interesting:

• they put a significant emphasis on honesty and transparency about the company processes – I value both myself a lot
• you have to require excellence – otherwise, how would you do great things?
• you can reduce control if you have a high level of trust and high talent density
• a group with one underperformer does worse than other teams by a massive 30-40%
• creative work requires freedom – this feels obvious, but I like how this is emphasized in the book
• a leader who has demonstrated competence and is liked by her team will build trust and prompt risk-taking when she widely sunshines her own mistakes (the pratfall effect)
• it’s important to make bold bets and own the outcomes, “sunshine” the failures when they happen so everyone can learn from them
• lead with context, not control – the quote by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry at the beginning of this post is an excellent poetic way to put it

For the sake of avoiding to retell the whole book in my post, I conclude. If you work on IT, leading teams, or if you are curious about how Netflix works, I recommend you read the book.

From me, the book gets 7/10. It could’ve gotten more, but too often it feels like a big marketing material on Netflix. It also doesn’t help that I am currently reading the “Built to Last” book, which is on a completely different level. I’ll share my thoughts on it in a separate post.

Scrum is an Agile framework that aims to deliver high-value products with minimum waste. As a software engineer, I’ve always been interested in becoming more efficient at what I do. During my over decade-long career, I have worked with different teams using different processes. Currently, my favorite is the Shape Up methodology proposed by the people behind the 37signals company.

I have to admit I was a bit hesitant at first to read “Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time” book due to a minor negative bias towards Scrum that I had developed from encountering a few cases that were misrepresenting it. However, I decided to give it a chance, and I’m glad I did. After finishing the book, I came to like Scrum more and was inspired to invest more time in learning how to implement it best. I even became a certified Professional Scrum Master!

I discovered that Scrum and Shape Up have more in common than I initially thought. Both frameworks value shipping things fast, emphasize the importance of teams owning the projects they build, and suggest driving the development by the user problems. The primary difference is that Scrum imposes more processes, which can be helpful to less experienced developers but cumbersome to more experienced ones. Scrum encourages collaboration and communication and allows for frequent feedback and adaptation. It emphasizes the importance of prioritizing work based on value and helps teams avoid getting bogged down by unnecessary tasks. Because Scrum is a complex framework, it’s easy to misimplement it, overfocus on some aspects of the process and ignore others, and lose the value Scrum can bring to the team. On the other hand, Shape Up is much more suited for experienced developers, brings just enough process into the work, and is structured in a way that makes it harder to misimplement.

Scrum can be a valuable framework for teams of all sizes and skill levels if implemented correctly. If you want to learn more about Scrum or Agile, I suggest giving “Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time” a read! The book provides an excellent introduction to Scrum and its benefits, as well as practical advice.

Hi. I will keep this post simple and stick to the last year’s format.

Let’s proceed with the reviews.

Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel and Blake Masters

This was the first book I read in the year 2022, and, to be honest with you, my memory of it has faded somewhat already, but I will do my best to give you an idea of what to expect from this book. This book talks about how hard and crucial it is to obtain the skill of getting the project from an idea (nothing, zero) to something useful (one).

Great things I remember / lessons learned:

1. Talk to your customers. A lot. Really understand their problems.
2. Focus on making the product accessible to the customer. If they can’t use it, it doesn’t matter how well it works and how hard of a problem it solves.
3. Act. Exercise bias for action. Cut corners, but know where to cut them. Without this, it’s impossible to go from zero to one fast enough to succeed.
4. Do not copy; build genuinely new things.
5. To succeed within the market, strive to be a monopoly. This point is very controversially interesting. Check out the book if you want to understand the author’s position more.

I enjoyed reading the author’s outlook on monopolies and economies, and I can definitely recommend the book; it’s a worthwhile read, though the author’s writing style may be off-putting to some readers.

The Indisputable Existence of Santa Claus: The Mathematics of Christmas by Hannah Fry and Thomas Oléron Evans

A friend of mine got this book for me for New Year’s, and it was the perfect addition to my holiday reading list. It’s a great collection of fun Christmas-related tidbits, with some of them, like a system for organizing a perfect Secret Santa event or the algorithm for fairly cutting a cake*, actually being handy. It’s a nice, light, and entertaining read.

*This algorithm becomes less useful when the number of people involved is more than three (-:

MAKE: Bootstrapper’s Handbook by Pieter Levels

MAKE is another startup builder’s book on this list. This one was written by Pieter Levels, who — from the vibe I get after reading the book — has mastered the art of lean startup. The main ideas that I liked are:

1. Release early and often.
2. Build minimal.
3. Try lots of ideas.

I love how many thoughts presented in this book overlap with what I learned from the “Zero to One” book:

Zero to One → MAKE

1. Talk to customers and understand their problems → solve your own problems, be your own customers because you are the expert in your own problems.
2. Become a monopoly → “Win” a micro-niche first, then expand.
3. Do not copy others → Do not clone what others are doing.

The list goes on.

Each book presents these ideas from very different perspectives despite the list above not making it obvious.

I also loved how the author suggested making idea generation an exercise — three project ideas daily.

I recommend reading this book to every developer and startup builder.

The Science-based Playbook of Pricing & Promotions by Thomas McKinlay

The book is written by Thomas McKinlay, author of Ariyh — a marketing newsletter where they share research-based practical insights. This is the shortest book I read that year, but it is the one I will talk about the most because I feel that the book and the newsletter don’t receive the attention they deserve. 15k+ subscribers? More people should know about it! I have been reading Ariyh for a few years and can confidently say it is a gem. Before (and after) finding Ariyh, I tried out a few marketing newsletters but couldn’t stand them because they constantly wanted to sell me something and were too opinionated. Ariyh, on the contrary, is a very objective newsletter; each issue of the newsletter is dedicated to a single practical marketing insight backed by one or more research papers linked in the newsletter. Each issue is concise and is written and structured in an easy-to-digest way. Every insight is actionable; even more, every issue explicitly outlines what you should do to apply the insight to your endeavor. The playbook is a collection of pricing- and promotions-related marketing insights, some of which you can find in the newsletter and some that only exist in the book.

If you are interested in marketing, this newsletter is one of the best resources to stay up-to-date with recent marketing research. And this book is excellent for everyone building or selling products. I especially loved the step-by-step guide to finding your most profitable price point, which is present only in the book.

Because I praise the book and the newsletter a lot, I feel I should say that I am in no way affiliated with Ariyh, and this is not a sponsored post. I praise it because it’s good; I’ve been reading the newsletter for a few years already, watched it grow, and it isn’t growing fast enough. There are few things of such high quality as Ariyh out there. Ariyh should be more well-known.

Inside Apple by Adam Lashinsky

It’s a worthwhile educational book about how Apple works. This book has its own blog post. I recommend you read it if you want to learn more about my impressions of it.

That’s all for the books of 2022. I am already excited about my 2023!

The book is an interesting read, is well-written, and shares facts and stories about Apple that I hadn’t heard before. I loved the many ideas presented in the book, but I also didn’t like a few. Among the many I loved are the following:

• focusing on the result, not on the implementation details
• mindfulness, the importance of maintaining focus, which is embodied within Apple’s culture
• emphasis on the user experience

At times, I felt like the images the author painted of Steve Jobs were too rough, sometimes even rude. I didn’t like this. It’s possible to be productive and successful without being rude. Don’t get me wrong; I value direct and concise communication, but let’s not confuse it with rudeness.

The most interesting parts of this book were the ideas crucial to the success of Apple. These are:

Focusing on the result, not on the implementation details. We shouldn’t allow ourselves to get slowed down by the nuances; instead, we should always keep the goal in view and be open to the new alternatives that may be discovered on the way toward the goal.

Mindfulness, focusing on the one current thing, obsession over quality. Ideas that otherwise can be summarized by saying, “wherever you are, be there wholly” and “do small things with great love.”

Obsessing over details and bringing a Buddhist level of focus to a narrow assortment of offerings sets Apple apart from its competitors. Buddhism — a faith Jobs studied intensely — teaches that if you are going to prepare a cup of tea, the making of the cup of tea should command all your attention; even this insignificant task should be completed with all the mastery you can bring to it.

Focusing on the user experience. The book stresses the importance of always thinking about how the user will interact with and perceive the product. After all, Apple’s goal is to provide the user with the best possible experience. Focusing on the user experience helps distance oneself from the implementation details and maintain mindfulness.

The book was an interesting and educational read. And, despite it painting a controversial picture of Apple and Jobs, it is hard not to admire the high level of work they both have done.

Back in the days, I used to read a lot. I would have a book in my hands every chance I had. Then came the period when I started reading much less for various reasons; this period lasting a while. A few years ago, I decided to fix this by explicitly setting aside some time to read and by listening to audiobooks in the gym. Then, COVID hit, meaning no gym, but possibly, more opportunities to read at home; I kind of naturally started to read a little bit more. And at the beginning of 2021, I set a goal on Goodreads to read five books in a year. It’s not much, but you have to start somewhere, and, IMO, it’s more motivating to hit a goal and over-achieve it than to under-achieve.

Goodreads reports that I’ve read ten books, which isn’t true because there are two papers on this list, an audiobook that I finally finished from before, and a book that I started in 2020; it’s a huge one, though.

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality by Eliezer Yudkowsky (started in 2020)

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality is the best fanfic I have ever read. It is about Harry Potter, about methods of rationality, and it is written by a decision theorist, artificial intelligence theorist, and a co-founder and research fellow at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute. If that isn’t enough of a recommendation for you, look at the chapter titles on the book’s website and check out my review.

Deep Learning for Coders with fastai & PyTorch by Jeremy Howard and Sylvain Gugger

This book is one of the best and practical introductory courses about Deep Learning – I love how practical it is. The excerpt below should give a better understanding of what I am talking about:

Harvard professor David Perkins, who wrote Making Learning Whole (Jossey-Bass), has much to say about teaching. The basic idea is to teach the whole game. That means that if you’re teaching baseball, you first take people to a baseball game or get them to play it. You don’t teach them how to wind twine to make a baseball from scratch, the physics of a parabola, or the coefficient of friction of a ball on a bat.
…
So, here’s our commitment to you. Throughout this book, we will follow these principles:
• Teaching the whole game. We’ll start by showing how to use a complete, working, very usable, state-of-the-art deep learning network to solve real-world problems, using simple, expressive tools. And then we’ll gradually dig deeper and deeper into understanding how those tools are made, and how the tools that make those tools are made, and so on…
• Always teaching through examples. We’ll ensure that there is a context and a purpose that you can understand intuitively, rather than starting with algebraic symbol manipulation.
• Simplifying as much as possible. We’ve spent years building tools and teaching methods that make previously complex topics very simple.
• Removing barriers. Deep learning has, until now, been a very exclusive game. We’re breaking it open, and ensuring that everyone can play.

The book covers the most relevant areas of machine learning, including deep learning for computer vision and natural language processing, decision trees, and collaborative filtering. The book and the course are comparatively modern. They were both updated in August of 2020. The course is available at course.fast.ai. The book is entirely written in Jupyter Notebooks and is freely available on GitHub. Still, if you want to read it from your reader’s convenience, you can grab a copy from Amazon or Kobo and support the authors.

Shape Up: Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work that Matters by Ryan Singer

The book describes a robust software development methodology honed inside of Basecamp. The methodology is laser-focused on shipping the product and features that matter to the end-user, provides ways to manage risks, and enables autonomy of developers, benefiting velocity. It profoundly resonates with me, and I love the idea of appetites vs. estimates a lot. It is my favorite methodology now, highly recommended to anyone involved with software development. The book is available freely here.

It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work by Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson

A fun book about work organization practices. It overlaps with Shape Up (and other “Books by Basecamp”) in some aspects, but, despite that, offers unique ideas and perspectives. It is also less focused on software development. If you are running a modern company, you’ll find something useful in this book, no matter the industry.

Remote: Office Not Required by Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson

Great book about remote work that was written before remote work became mainstream. It has something to offer, even to someone who has been successfully working remotely for a few years already, and it is a delightful read.

Read more about these three and other “books by Basecamp” in my review here.

The Lean Startup: How Constant Innovation Creates Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries

The Lean Startup is another entertaining and enlightening book about building startups. I love the ideas and the illustrations presented, and I am itching to apply the lessons learned.

Instead, the way forward is to learn to see every startup in any industry as a grand experiment. The question is not “Can this product be built?” In the modern economy, almost any product that can be imagined can be built. The more pertinent questions are “Should this product be built?” and “Can we build a sustainable business around this set of products and services?” To answer those questions, we need a method for systematically breaking down a business plan into its component parts and testing each part empirically. In other words, we need the scientific method. In the Lean Startup model, every product, every feature, every marketing campaign—everything a startup does—is understood to be an experiment designed to achieve validated learning.

The Little Book of Common Sense Investing: The Only Way to Guarantee Your Fair Share of Stock Market Returns by John C. Bogle

Your chances of earning your fair share of the market’s returns are greatly enhanced if you minimize your trading in stocks.

This book is an excellent introduction to investing. The author sold me on index funds. This is not surprising because he is the creator of the first index fund. Now I am interested in reading a book presenting an opposing view.

Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink, Leif Babin

This is the audiobook that I started earlier and finished in 2021. The funny thing is that I do not remember having the intention to read or listen to this book. If I remember correctly, I listened to it only because it was available for free with the Audible subscription back then, and I wanted to listen to something at that moment. I picked it because it was the only business book in the selection. Now, I am happy to say that the book exceeded my expectations. It is a great book on management that, in my opinion, will benefit everyone, from individual contributors to managers of any level. The book focuses on the idea of extreme ownership, which is explained from different perspectives using different real-life illustrations from both business and military worlds.

[Paper] No Silver Bullet Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering by Frederick P. Brooks Jr.

This is one of the most known articles on software development. It’s short, so instead of reading me paraphrasing ideas from it to you, just read it yourself.

[Paper] Computing machinery and intelligence by Alan Turing

This one is another classical article, this time on artificial intelligence. This famous paper asks the question “Can machines think?” and introduces the renowned Turing test to help answer it. This one I highly recommend to everyone. And, yet again, it’s short, so just read it – trust me.

Last year I read many more papers on AI and ML, but listing them here won’t fit the format of this post. If you are interested in discussing AI, follow me on Twitter.

This year, my reading goal is to read seven books, and I already have enough books beside me to fulfill it, thanks to Grid and my friends from whom I received a few fantastic books at the end of last year.

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality is, by far, the best fanfiction I have ever read. And it is also one of the best science fiction books I have ever read.

The story is set in a world familiar to those who read the original Harry Potter books or watched the movies. The world is the same but with a few changes. Lily Potter, Harry’s mother, had a good relationship with her sister, Petunia, who married a successful Oxford professor. Petunia and her husband didn’t have kids, and after they had to take in Harry, they raised him in a loving and caring environment. Harry, mainly thanks to his father, grew up to be a very smart and educated kid. He is a firm believer in the scientific method, and at the same time, still, a kid, who has a fresh pair of wide eyes and looks at the world with childish curiosity, all of which makes him a perfect scientist. When he receives the letter from Hogwarts, he approaches this situation scientifically. Saying anything else can spoil the fun of reading the book.

The fanfic is available to read and download here. Check out the chapter titles. If they make you giggle, then you’ll enjoy the book!

If you are not convinced that you should read it yet, let me share a few quotes from the book with you:

Where do you come from, strange little prediction? Harry directed the thought at his brain. Why do I believe what I believe?

“But make no mistake, Draco, true science really isn’t like magic, you can’t just do it and walk away unchanged like learning how to say the words of a new spell. The power comes with a cost, a cost so high that most people refuse to pay it.” Draco nodded at this as though, finally, he’d heard something he could understand. “And that cost?” “Learning to admit you’re wrong.” “Um,” Draco said after the dramatic pause had stretched on for a while. “You going to explain that?” “Trying to figure out how something works on that deep level, the first ninety-nine explanations you come up with are wrong. The hundredth is right. So you have to learn how to admit you’re wrong, over and over and over again. It doesn’t sound like much, but it’s so hard that most people can’t do science. Always questioning yourself, always taking another look at things you’ve always taken for granted,” like having a Snitch in Quidditch, “and every time you change your mind, you change yourself.”

“The truth is sacred,” Harry said tonelessly. “One of my most treasured possessions is a button which reads ‘Speak the truth, even if your voice trembles’.”

I’ve recently finished reading the last book of five written by those behind the Basecamp company. I read some of them a while ago, so my memory about their content could be better. Still, I’ll compensate for that by describing my impressions. I’m going to list the books in the order in which I read them, starting from the one I read first. These books can be classified as business books, but, to me, they are also excellent self and time management books, with a focus on productivity and work-life balance. All of the books discuss different processes that allow people at Basecamp to work efficiently and happily. I should explicitly mention that the books are well-structured and written in concise and straightforward language.

Rework by Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson (published in 2010, read in 2013)

Workaholics aren’t heroes. They don’t save the day, they just use it up. The real hero is already home because she figured out a faster way to get things done.

Rework is the first book by Basecamp that I read in 2013, back when my friends and I worked on our startup, Cat Taxi. I don’t remember many of the exact things that I read in this book. But I do remember the lasting impression that it left on me. In the book, Jason and David talk about principles they apply at their company, focusing on the most common misconceptions about business and work processes. I remember that the chapter on workaholics impressed me the most. Before reading this book, I felt proud of putting in lots of hours, which, back then and now, inevitably leads to inefficient work. The essence of that Rework chapter is well covered by the linked post written by Jason Fried.

Getting Real: The Smarter, Faster, Easier Way to Build a Web Application by Basecamp (published in 2006, read in September 2019)

Make decisions just in time, when you have access to the real information you need. In the meanwhile, you’ll be able to lavish attention on the things that require immediate care.

Getting Real is by far the best book on time management that I’ve read. And, although it talks about software development, the principles it describes can be easily applied to almost any work process. While reading it, I constantly had deja vu; the book reminded me of Rework and sometimes felt like “Rework v0.1.” Don’t get me wrong; these “Aha, I’ve read this!” or “Aha, I’ve thought of this!” were welcome reactions. Even if you share and follow the principles described in the book, it offers an excellent and concise recap. It’s pretty short, much shorter than Rework; I managed to read it in a few days, only reading it when I cooked myself lunch. To sum up, Getting Real is a great book on time management and software project management that you can read in a few hours, and it’s available for free. I think it’s the best book to start reading “Books by Basecamp” and understand whether you’ll like the others.

Shape Up: Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work that Matters by Ryan Singer (published in 2019, read in May 2021)

An appetite is completely different from an estimate. Estimates start with a design and end with a number. Appetites start with a number and end with a design. We use the appetite as a creative constraint on the design process.

Shape Up is the last one of the “Books by Basecamp” and also freely available. Shape Up is the name of the software development methodology developed at Basecamp. Shape Up is the result of 20 years of work and refinements of the internal software development practices. It’s the quintessence of the ideas published in all of the other Basecamp books. When building on these ideas, Shape Up offers concrete methodologies closely tied to software development. The text is full of extremely practical business cases and examples from Basecamp’s experience, with a lot of them featuring their own tool, Basecamp. This is the book you should read if you want to “Shape Up” your company. In my opinion, this is another great book to familiarize yourself with “Books by Basecamp.”

It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work by Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson (published in 2018, read in May 2021)

We don’t want reactions. We don’t want first impressions. We don’t want knee-jerks. We want considered feedback. Read it over. Read it twice, three times even. Sleep on it. Take your time to gather and present your thoughts — just like the person who pitched the original idea took their time to gather and present theirs.

This is another great book about time and project management. I read this one after Shape Up, and it felt like a broader version of Shape Up. Shape Up goes deeper into the particularities of software development. It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work explores the motivation behind these principles and ideas in more detail. It goes broader and covers a wider spectrum of topics compared to Shape Up, which focuses on software development. Thanks to that, It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work is suitable for a wide range of companies. I’ll first recommend this book to people who want to “Shape Up” a non-software development company. The book is still great for software developers — please, go ahead and read it; it’s incredible! But, it would be much more interesting to non-software developers compared to Shape Up. I also loved the bolder language in which this book is written.

The excerpt quoted above refers to favoring async communication before sync (e.g., email vs. IM). Here is an amazing Basecamp article stating clear arguments in favor of async communication.

Remote: Office Not Required by Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson (published in 2013, read in May 2021)

The ability to be alone with your thoughts is, in fact, one of the key advantages of working remotely.

I wasn’t rushing to read this book mainly because when I first heard of it, I was already enjoying the benefits of remote work and didn’t expect to find many new insights. I read it last and enjoyed it a lot. The reading process, for me, was accompanied by pleasant “Aha, I had already thought of that” and a few exciting “Cool, I didn’t look at this from that perspective!” moments. Now I know which book to recommend to people interested in remote work and those who are thinking about inviting their employees back to the office once the COVID-19 situation dies down.

Conclusion

All of these books are written in the same spirit, and I highly recommend anyone who works in software development to read all of them; everyone else — to read at least some of them. At times the books can be repetitive. Although this can be off-putting to some readers, I enjoyed them since, even if the books discuss the same topic, each of them often offers a unique perspective. I hope that you’ll enjoy them as much as I did!

TL;DR: 10/10, highly recommend.

The book is a collection of the most impactful papers written by Rogers over the course of decades centered around the idea of becoming.

Life is guided by a changing understanding of and interpretation of my experience. It is always in process of becoming.

I very much enjoyed Roger’s optimistic outlook on people. I like how he presents his thoughts, and that he focuses on relationships and their role in people and society’s functioning.

The method he and his co-workers used to measure psychotherapy’s effectiveness on people is noteworthy. The team prepared a set of one hundred cards to represent different aspects of a character through adjectives and phrases that participants of psychotherapy used to describe themselves most often. On a schedule, they asked study participants to distribute these cards into ten piles — ranging from “certainly about me” to “totally not about me.” During the whole experiment, participants were asked to put a specific amount of cards into each pile — following a normal distribution. By enforcing this rule and using the same set of cards for every measurement and participant, researchers ensured an easy comparison. Essentially, they vectorized each measurement, turning it into a set of numbers. By doing so, they were able to, quite easily, compare states of the same person’s psyche at different times or even one person to another. And this is not an easy task to achieve.

The overall level at which this experiment was conducted impressed me, specifically, the researchers even controlled for the effect of actual desire to receive psychotherapy. In addition to that, they took measurements of people’s ideal self (besides their self-perception) and had a group of independent psychologists profile study participants the same way by “distributing cards” based on the recordings of interviews with the aforementioned participants to allow for an outside view on them.

I like Rogers’ outlook on people the most because he values each person and sees an opportunity for constructive improvement in everyone. This resonates with me a lot. And I believe this outlook — being open and kind to people — brings an actual positive change in people and society. As someone once said, “kindness goes a long way.” The most significant bit is when someone receives this kind treatment, they feel more comfortable and can act freer and more creatively; it sets off a chain of positive reactions and helpful changes in them, leading to more fulfilling and happy relationships and society.

Now I want to talk about an idea of Rogers that I don’t quite understand. In the later part of the book, Rogers starts talking about the behavioral sciences and their implications for society. And you can tell that he is afraid that the products of developed behavioral sciences will create an anti-utopian society thoroughly controlled by these products.

Aldous Huxley, in his Brave New World (1), has given a horrifying picture of saccharine happiness in a scientifically managed world, against which man eventually revolts. George Orwell, in 1984 (5), has drawn a picture of the world created by dictatorial power, in which the behavioral sciences are used as instruments of absolute control of individuals so that not behavior alone but even thought is controlled.

He continues by talking about causality regarding human behavior and how those who understand the laws behind it can affect it. He is afraid that this control will not allow society to be creative, and creativity, as he says, is required for us to survive in the “brave new” technological world that we are building. From there he gradually goes to the question of free will, asking if there actually is causality in human behavior and whether a human can even be creative. What does it mean to be creative, he asks. To which he responds that, yes, a human can be creative, and there is free will. To illustrate his point, Rogers draws to the scientific method, which is, in essence, a controlled process focused on finding causality laws. At the same time, researchers freely choose how and where to apply this method. Therefore, this is an example of free will in action determining the outcome of specific research. Or, at least, this is how I understood his position regarding this question. This last point, this example, is the one I don’t get. I cannot agree with it. It looks to me like Rogers deliberately excludes the researcher and the outside world from the “causality system” during the thought experiment. From my perspective, the researcher is part of a bigger system, and his life and decisions are affected by societal, economic, and cultural influences. Consequently, there is a cause for his actions and decisions; the only thing is that we don’t always grasp it.

In short, can science discover the methods by which man can most readily become a continually developing and self-transcending process, in his behavior, his thinking, his knowledge? Can science predict and release an essentially “unpredictable” freedom?

John Dewey’s statement: “Science has made its way by releasing, not by suppressing, the elements of variation, of invention and innovation, of novel creation in individuals.”

Rogers ends the book on the paradoxical and optimistic note that is summed up very well by the following excerpt:

Or at the other end of the spectrum of choice we can choose to use the behavioral sciences in ways which will free, not control; which will bring about constructive variability, not conformity; which will develop creativity, not contentment; which will facilitate each person in his self-directed process of becoming; which will aid individuals, groups, and even the concept of science, to become self-transcending in freshly adaptive ways of meeting life and its problems. The choice is up to us, and the human race being what it is, we are likely to stumble about, making at times some nearly disastrous value choices, and at other times highly constructive ones.

Having said all of this, I highly recommend this thought-provoking, dense, relatively easy to understand book packed with ideas and information. Thank you for reading my impressions, and if you decide to read the book, I hope you enjoy it! :)

The fact is that there is nothing as dreamy and poetic, nothing as radical,
subversive, and psychedelic, as mathematics. It is every bit as mind blowing as cosmology or physics (mathematicians conceived of black holes long before astronomers actually found any), and allows more freedom of expression than poetry, art, or music (which depend heavily on properties of the physical universe). Mathematics is the purest of the arts, as well as the most misunderstood.

Today I’m going to recommend a short article by Paul Lockhart, “A Mathematician’s Lament”, a thought-provoking piece of textual art. The author boldly claims that math is an art and proves it, confidently, by walking you through his arguments. Paul Lockhart argues that we, as a society, greatly misunderstand what mathematics is and are trapped in a positive feedback loop of a broken school education system, which, in turn, reinforces the misunderstanding.

The tone of the prose is light-hearted, playful, serious, and concerned — all at the same time. This contributes a lot to the article being so engaging.

I, personally, very much enjoyed looking at math as art. The ideas presented in the text are very inspiring; they just feel right. There is also a book that was born out of the article! It promises to be an exciting read.

TL;DR: 8/10. I like the book; it is a captivating story written in a fantastic style, which I completely fell in love with! There are a few weird moments in the second part of the book, but they can be perceived realistically, depending on your perspective. Also, the climax of the novel truly deserves a “what a twist” meme reaction :-D

I think it would be no bad thing if boys like you all grew up with a bit of everything. We might all treat each other a good deal better then. Be less of these wars for one thing. Oh yes. Perhaps one day, all these conflicts will end, and it won’t be because of great statesmen or churches or organisations like this one. It’ll be because people have changed. They’ll be like you, Puffin. More a mixture. So why not become a mongrel? It’s healthy.

The author tells us the story of a boy named Christopher, who spends his childhood in Shanghai, loses his parents under mysterious circumstances, and grows up with his aunt in London to become a successful and renowned detective. That was a summary of the first half of the book. The second half, or more precisely, the last third of the book starts with Christopher moving to Shanghai to once and for all finally close his parents’ case, and, hopefully, find them. By that time, he gathered all the evidence he thinks he needs, and, most importantly, enough confidence to finish the mission that is about to bring quite a few surprises and reunite him with a childhood friend.

“I can see it might look that way. At least to someone observing me with a cynical eye.” “I hope I don’t observe you in that way. It would upset me to think I did so.”

The number one thing I love about the book is the author’s style. It makes me want to read his other books. I also like the plot and that the story develops along two different timelines in parallel to each other for most of the book. I enjoyed the “detective” aspect of the book. In addition, it is interesting, and adds to the story a lot, that the author touches the subject of the Second Sino-Japanese War and the implications it had. Furthermore, I like a lot of small scenes through the book due to the combination of style and story.

Here, in other words, at the heart of the maelstrom threatening to suck in the whole of the civilised world, is a pathetic conspiracy of denial; a denial of responsibility which has turned in on itself and gone sour, manifesting itself in the sort of pompous defensiveness I have encountered so often. And here they now were, the so-called elite of Shanghai, treating with such contempt the suffering of their Chinese neighbours across the canal.

What I don’t like about the book is a few weird moments in the last third part of it, which made me question Christopher’s sanity. However, maybe it was the intention of the author. Also, the main plot twist was unexpected and didn’t resonate with the mood of the book for me.

Overall, the book is a great entertaining read; the style is fantastic, and I recommend it!

TL;DR: 6.5/10. Great start, excellent adventure, great humor (mostly concentrated in the first half of the book), very well written, but an unrealistic and much weaker ending.

Human is a real bipedal life form of midrange intelligence, living a largely deluded existence on a small, waterlogged planet in a very lonely corner of the universe.

Don’t ever be afraid of telling someone you love them. There are things wrong with your world, but an excess of love is not one.

“The Humans” starts as a guide into the humankind written from the point of view of the super-intelligent alien. The alien is not familiar with Earth except knowing about its existence and sharing a limited set of prejudices about its inhabitants; this allows us to explore ourselves anew through its eyes. The author is succeeding a lot in depicting the alien’s first experiences among us, filling them with a lot of cynical jokes and comments.

I have come to a planet where the most intelligent life-form still has to drive its own cars…

The alien arrives with a pretty explicit goal: to save the humankind and the universe (from the humanity) by slowing down its progress. The issue is that Andrew Martin, Mathematics Professor of Cambridge University, discovered a solution to the Riemann hypothesis. The discovery means an immerse scientific leap for humans: instant space travel, immortality, and anything else we can, and can not, imagine. And, according to the aliens who sent our hero to Earth, humans, destructive by nature, are not ready for this technological leap.

What I like about this book: an original alien perspective on humanity, the quite well thought-out beginning of the book, jokes in the first 2/3 half of the book, a few nice thoughts, emphasis on the value of human life, human relationships, kindness, honesty, love, care.

What I don’t like about this book: that the author is bending established rules in the last third of the book, a blunt “deus ex machina” moment closer to the end of the book, and that author mentions a conflict between technological progress and humanity, intelligence and emotional ability, sensitivity.

Overall, the book is a good entertaining read, and I recommend it.