Emma Goto

Tragic that the author wasn't alive to see the killer found. Wish the book could've included more info about the killer and how he was linked to Michelle's theories.

Pity it's only a novella. I think the most interesting part about this book was that the murderbot doesn't have a gender yet for the first half I was completely convinced it was a female - and if you go and read other reviews there's a good mix of referring to it as he or she.

Last month I finished reading The Pragmatic Programmer. I will admit I don’t necessarily *enjoy* reading software development books in my spare time, but I definitely got some good insights out of this book that I want to apply going forward.

Build a knowledge portfolio

Your knowledge portfolio is all the facts, experience and knowledge that you have related to programming. Similar to how you’d build a financial portfolio, you should make sure that your knowledge portfolio is diversified - you don’t want to put all your eggs in one basket! Keep an eye on technology trends, and make sure to “invest” in new areas or new technologies. Learn a new language once in a while.

If you want to “buy low and sell high”, you could learn an emerging technology before it takes off, which can lead to a large payoff (if it does take off!). The authors suggest also reading technical books, taking classes in a new area you’re interested in, or joining meetups.

I know for me personally right now I’ve been very focused on React due to my job, but I do want to branch out into checking out other frontend frameworks and technologies like Svelte, Preact or Vue. I’ve also got my eye on learning a bit of Ruby on Rails so I can try and contribute to the DEV repository.

Make sure your code is orthogonal

In software, two things are considered orthogonal if a change in one does not affect the other. For example, if you had an app with a database and a UI, swapping out the database shouldn’t require you to touch the UI.

Ask yourself: If I dramatically change the requirements behind a particular function, how many modules are affected?

As a general rule, you want your components to be self-contained. This reduces risk - if you’re relying on a third-party library, but want to swap it out for another one, this should become relatively straightforward. If you make changes in an area, you will feel confident that these changes won’t affect anywhere else. Having simpler, smaller components will also mean it’s easier to write and run tests on them, as well as making things more reusable.

Achieve editor fluency

Being fluent with an editor basically involves knowing a lot of shortcuts. When you’re writing code, you want to spend less time thinking about *how* to write the code into your editor and more time spent being in the flow of writing the code. I know how to comment and un-comment a line, but I have no clue how to select a select a word at a time or line at a time (I just use my mouse to select things) so I know this is something I need to work on.

If you want a challenge, you could stop using your mouse or trackpad for a week, and only use the keyboard to code. The less painful way to achieve editor fluency is to ask yourself, as you code, if there’s a simpler way of doing the thing you’re doing. Then go and find that out, and start using it whenever you can. This may be a new keyboard shortcut, or it may be a new extension you can install on your IDE. If you can’t find a solution, you could even write your own extension.

Have an engineering daybook

The authors recommend carrying around a paper notebook, and using it to take notes every day with what you’ve been working on. It can also be a place where you store ideas. The benefit here is that you can look back on it later, and re-remember why you decided to do something the way you did. The act of writing a problem or solution down can also help you take a step back and realise if you’re doing something wrong.

The book specifically recommends using paper and not a digital solution - which is not something I’m sure I agree with. I do currently take some notes on my laptop when I’m stuck with something and find the solution later, which has been useful as ideas for blog posts, and I definitely want to keep this habit up. I might extend it to writing more of a daily log of what I’ve been working on.

Use property-based testing

When you write unit tests, you generally think about the ways your code could go wrong, and write tests to cover those cases. But what happens if you make an incorrect assumption while writing these tests, or don’t realise you’ve missed a specific edge case?

Enter property-based testing. Instead of providing one input and testing for one specific output, you’d provide a property (for example, when testing a sorting function the property would be asserting that the result is properly sorted) and then the test would test a bunch of different, random combinations to try and see if the property ever fails. Depending on the language you use, there will be probably be a property-testing library out there, e.g. JSVerify for JavaScript.

It wasn't too dry to read but felt like too broad of an overview.

The author shortened the poem to about a third of its original length and added in some explanations / analysis along the way. Still pretty hard to read, I wish there was more analysis by the author so that I could better understand what was going on.

Pretty intense book, composed entirely of people's accounts of living in the USSR during its collapse. It took me a while to get into it, and I felt it got better / more interesting / easier to read about a third or a half of the way in.

I think this book is best paired with some prior reading or knowledge on this period in history (unfortunately I lacked that) since the context is useful when reading this book.

The only thing I knew going into reading Wuthering Heights was that it was some sort of love story with a guy named Heathcliff. Unfortunately Heathcliff is a pretty terrible person and there is a love story but it's very tragic. Overall though it is impressive that Emily Brontë managed to write something like this in 19th century England.

On first thoughts I gave this book a 3/5 but I've revised it to a 4/5 - Mr Rochester is a mostly unappealing romantic lead with his age gap and his clinginess (especially in comparison to Jane Austen's Mr Darcy), but it's kind of amazing that Charlotte Brontë wrote something like this as a woman in the 19th century.

Not quite 4 stars but closer to 4 than a 3 - the main character felt a bit cliche (sad backstory but they're an emotionally hardened badass now) and I didn't really enjoy the writing style, especially at the start.

Religious self-help book disguised as a fiction novel.

Basically like a Greek mythology version of Wicked.

Some of the short stories were great, others not so much.

Was a bit dry at times, not as gripping as Guinn's other biography for Jim Jones.

Women in the 17th century did not live a good life! Kind of depressing to read how weak the main character is.

Decided to pick this one up because it's considered an Australian classic - buts it's more a classic in the sense that it was really popular when it was published, not really because it's groundbreaking in any way. Giving it somewhere between a 3 and a 4, but bumping it down to a 3 because while I did enjoy it, I wouldn't recommend anyone go out of their way to read it.

I don't read much historical nonfiction but this was a fun one!

Giving it a 4 for the concept (what happens when women gain the ability to electrocute people, and become the dominant gender?) but unfortunately the characters were boring and hard to engage with and the ending was a bit disappointing.

Really in-depth, the author did his research.

Super super violent (people and animals dying everywhere) and McCarthy's writing style is hard to read (as expected). It's the sort of book that they'd get you to read in an English class - it's probably going to be considered as a classic, but it wasn't super enjoyable for me to read.

For a sci-fi book published in the 1930s, it has aged very well! Didn't realise CS Lewis wrote sci-fi. Very short book, my favourite part was the Hrossa (otter people).

I wish the author would dive a bit deeper into the culture of the different races, but it was still a fun (albeit quick) read.

The first 50 pages were boring but once it got going I couldn't put it down. Great plot, writing - the shit this guy thinks up of is amazing.

It irritated me that the author always wrote “the ONE Thing” and then you'd have to see that phrase like 10 times on the one page.

I've read about GTD online before and found it interesting but the actual book was pretty dry and boring to read.

The author acknowledges that Atomic Habits builds upon some of the content laid out in The Power of Habit, and so if you had to pick one of the two to read, this one is not it!

The one benefit this book provides is that James Clear provides more practical advice on how to build your habits (which The Power of Habit doesn't do).

However Charles Duhigg does a better job of mixing science, facts and small stories about habits to prove his point - you can tell he's the better writer.