* Diaspora by Greg Egan: Hard sci-fi about quite a few things but mostly centering around the nature of consciousness. Although it is about a number of different big ideas and spans a long, long time, the story gels together really well. A lot of the physics and maths stuff flew…
* Storyworthy by Matthew Dicks: This is a book about how to tell better stories, by an award-winning Moth storyteller. The book also talks about how to find better stories from your life. Besides surgically analyzing what goes into crafting a great story, the book is filled with great stories from…
* Tiassa by Steven Brust: Part of the Vlad Taltos series. This one was really good. It is written from the perspectives of different characters in the story– not first-person like the other books in the series, but the focus shifts between different different people in each chapter, and you get…
* Deep Work(Audiobook) by Cal Newport: Somewhat of a re-read. I read most of the book a few years ago but never finished it. Like most of the books in the category, most of the value from reading this book comes just from getting nudged into assessing the things you…
* The Start-Up of You by Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha: A career book by a LinkedIn cofounder. Emphasizes networking as an essential tool to advance your career; unsurprisingly advocates using LinkedIn to do this. * Ultralearning by Scott Young: The book describes an approach to learning by immersing yourself in projects…
I have been familiarizing myself with WebAssembly by writing small WAT files and looking at the WASM output for some simple C functions. WebAssembly Studio is a great tool for doing this kind of exploration. Branching in WebAssembly takes some getting used to– for one thing, the target of your…
* Issola by Steven Brust: [spoiler]<span class=”spoiler”> The Jenoine, the alien species that created Dragaerans and who once ruled the earth, kidnap Morrolan and Aliera in order to try to get Vlad to kill Verra. This turns out to be part of a bigger plan to use…
Of late, my main side project has been rug, a stripped-down Git implementation which I’m building in Rust. I’m following along James Coglan’s excellent book Building Git where he lays out how he went about building the same project, in Ruby. <img src=”/images/rug-status.png”…