For years, companies have rewarded their most effective engineers with management positions. But treating management …
Review of "Staff Engineer's Path" on 'Goodreads'
5 stars
The go to reference book for the experienced software engineer wondering what happens now. A worthy companion to The Manager's Path, while this is a bit less focused on career progression, it does a great job of illuminating the responsibilities and dynamics that occur as you mature in the industry. Probably a good read for managers who have senior reports to help frame your expectations for their performance and to identify where they might need support or training to continue developing.
Ils s'imaginaient passer un chouette week-end dans une somptueuse villa en bord de lac. Onze …
Review of 'Nice House on the Lake Tome 2' on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
The end of the beginning of the end. Walter plays his carnival mirror Christ resurrection card and we get some insight into how the cast ends up in their flash forward monologue scenarios. It's been about a year since I read vol 1 so it took a while to remember where it had left off, which didn't mean nicely with the memory (un-)wiping trope. This is definitely feeling more and more like Lost as it goes on and I'm not sure I care enough about these characters and how they interact to overlook the melodramatic twists and turns. Still the art captures the mood well so I'll grant it another volume to see if it finds its feet again.
"An all-new 40,000-word Stormlight Archive novella, "Edgedancer," will be the crown jewel of Arcanum Unbounded: …
Review of 'Arcanum unbounded' on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
A compendium of extremely long short stories and novellas, with some extra scene setting and author commentary sprinkled throughout. If you're on the Cosmere train this helps fill in some gaps and provides a sneak peak at new worlds, otherwise it's a solid collection but I'm not sure who else would go out of their way to read this.
An ode to both the GBBO and murder mysteries from a classic pairing of creators. It's a bit weird to see Shauna out of context from the other mystery kids and I think the four issue format rushed the story a bit, but this should please fans of the Bobbinsverse and the big tent show with its attention to detail, madcap humour and a buttery biscuit base of warm humanity.
"Come along and ride the rails with the mysterious, unbeatable hobo Jackson -- plus his …
Review of 'Rock Candy Mountain' on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
Witty hobo adventure that mostly left me confused and frustrated. It's not a great sign when one of your two protagonists sole purpose is to constantly have things explained to them. I suspect you have to be a bigger fan of hobos than I am to love this.
A thematic encyclopaedia of concepts that are relevant to succeeding in business.
Review of 'The personal MBA' on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
An overview of the current state of business wisdom and some business adjacent fluff, that Is fully bought into the American capitalist ideology. This makes it a useful starting point for what passes for common sense and pointers to further topics worth reading into, but your critical thinking skills need to be engaged to sift the wheat from the chaff. Chunks of the book seem to be trendy personal productivity "hacks" which feel out of place for the mission of the book. Much will feel vaguely familiar but having it all next to each other is useful to see these concepts in context.
Боб Йоханссон – инженер и фанат вселенной «Звездного пути» – заключает договор с криокомпанией, которая …
Review of 'Мы – Легион. Мы – Боб' on 'Goodreads'
1 star
A decent premise ruined by a thoroughly irritating POV character that we end up with multiple indistinguishable copies of. There is a moment near the start where it looks like an unsympathetic character might possibly have to confront his character flaws and suffer for his hubris, but nope, Bob turns out to be the perfect Mary Sue for this post apocalyptic space exploration Isekai. The most irritating feature is the author's tendency to declare various things as universal truths when there's scant evidence presented to justify it and besides this is a work of fiction, bringing attention to it just ruins the suspension of disbelief. By far the most disgusting section is his adventures intervening in primitive civilizations where every decision is wrong and horrific but is apparently justified. Steer clear, for tales of distributed intelligence go read the Ancillary books, for hard sci-fi tales of early stage colonization there's …
A decent premise ruined by a thoroughly irritating POV character that we end up with multiple indistinguishable copies of. There is a moment near the start where it looks like an unsympathetic character might possibly have to confront his character flaws and suffer for his hubris, but nope, Bob turns out to be the perfect Mary Sue for this post apocalyptic space exploration Isekai. The most irritating feature is the author's tendency to declare various things as universal truths when there's scant evidence presented to justify it and besides this is a work of fiction, bringing attention to it just ruins the suspension of disbelief. By far the most disgusting section is his adventures intervening in primitive civilizations where every decision is wrong and horrific but is apparently justified. Steer clear, for tales of distributed intelligence go read the Ancillary books, for hard sci-fi tales of early stage colonization there's the Expanse, for Pop culture laden self insert ego trips there's always Homestuck.
Review of 'Six Sidekicks of Trigger Keaton, Volume 1' on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
Great fun as the long suffering sidekicks of gruff martial arts diva try to solve his somewhat untimely demise. A solid ensemble of characters, colorful and playful artwork and good back matter to flesh out the universe. Bonus points for a neurodiverse coded character without getting too weird about it.
The first book in the Between Earth and Sky trilogy, inspired by the civilizations of …
Review of 'Black Sun' on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
A pulpy fantasy in a setting inspired by South American and indigenous cultures. It ends on a massive cliffhanger and while one arc of plot is resolved, it does not feel like this book stands by itself. Annoyingly the plot is driven by characters making bad decisions they probably shouldn't have been in the position to make and what passes for political intrigue is really just high school drama. The effort that's gone into works building is all that brings this up to ⭐⭐⭐, I don't care enough to suffer through another two of these.
Doesn't quite hit the mark but a worthy experiment. The goal here seems to have been to tell the story with no intelligible language, but while the broad strokes are delivered, the attempts at nuance and subtlety are lost in the noise. In particular the nature of the force keeping the girl and the warrior on course is not clear, which makes the climax of the story a confusing mess. And using a fictional hieroglyph is cheating. However, the core tale is interesting and the imagery is fantastic and beautifully coloured, it just feels like the gimmick does more to hinder than help the story.
An assortment of opinions about Software Engineering management in large webstack companies, some of which are interesting and useful, and others either address circumstances I've yet to encounter or likely never will. Larson's conflation of "Engineering Management" with "Software Engineering Management in a small handful of high-scale fast growth companies that happened to flourish in the early 21st century" is frustrating, but once you understand that he's writing primarily from his career experience the limitations and utility of his advice is more apparent. One thing this book is useful for is the bibliography, both of books and papers, but you can find equivalent links on his blog (where much of the content of the book was workshopped anyway): lethain.com/best-books/, lethain.com/some-of-my-favorite-technical-papers/ . This definitely suffers from the incoherency of blog-to-book adapations (e.g. rands, Spolsky) but on the other hand as a curated set of related ideas it's more tractable to …
An assortment of opinions about Software Engineering management in large webstack companies, some of which are interesting and useful, and others either address circumstances I've yet to encounter or likely never will. Larson's conflation of "Engineering Management" with "Software Engineering Management in a small handful of high-scale fast growth companies that happened to flourish in the early 21st century" is frustrating, but once you understand that he's writing primarily from his career experience the limitations and utility of his advice is more apparent. One thing this book is useful for is the bibliography, both of books and papers, but you can find equivalent links on his blog (where much of the content of the book was workshopped anyway): lethain.com/best-books/, lethain.com/some-of-my-favorite-technical-papers/ . This definitely suffers from the incoherency of blog-to-book adapations (e.g. rands, Spolsky) but on the other hand as a curated set of related ideas it's more tractable to get through than a decade of blog entries. Much like Staff Engineer, it's a bit short, and clearly padded out, and the advice is less generally applicable than it might appear at first glance, but there are definitely some useful nuggets in here alongside reminders of other people's good advice.
An epic account of the decades-long battle to control what has emerged as the world’s …
Review of 'Chip War' on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
A history of the semiconductor industry which provides context to understand the recent geopolitical tensions it finds itself at the heart of. It's distinctly critical of the impact of globalization on strategic industrial decisions made around the turn of the century, but isn't innately pro American. Could maybe have spent a bit more time on labour issues, but they're not completely absent.
An antimeme is an idea with self-censoring properties ; an idea which, by its intrinsic …
Review of 'There Is No Antimemetics Division' on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
Mind bending cosmic horror that's reminiscent of the laundry files and towards the end, COVID. It's nice to find science fiction with a novel conceit that's delivered as well as this one. Each chapter builds on the previous until we're through the looking glass. By the nature of the topic it has plenty of opportunity to talk about the importance of memory, though I feel like it only scratches the surface of the setting.
