Ignacio Torres
I grabbed this book not as an entrepreneurship or Kickstarter guide but to know more about their authors, the people behind Studio Neat, as I like their products and wanted a look behind the scenes.
In that sense it is an interesting and easy read. Also I think the first chapter (Philosophy) is a good summary of best practices in design.
I have really enjoyed this book. I was a teenager on the 90s and remember reading the t-files from the cDc and later the appearance of Back Orifice.
I looked if there was any book about the cDc after they showed Veilid in DEF CON 31:
https://youtu.be/Kb1lKscAMDQ
And if you read this book you will see that Veilid has been a long time in the making.
xXx / RULE BOVINIA \ xXx
tl;dr get this book. Read it. Enjoy Vim like never before.
The first chapters of this book are a great introduction to the use of Vim for new users and upon reading some pages they will be more proficient than many seasoned users that didn't read the manual or grok Vim's style.
For the seasoned and expert user there is A LOT of information and tips in this book. Everyone will find something new and mind blowing.
Don't read this book. It's the original 2485 words Bullet Journal system soaked in more than 60000 words of snake oil.
I have used the recommendations in my notes since 2014, so I remember the original single page explanation. If you want to learn it in 3 minutes continue reading.
The original page: https://web.archive.org/web/20130818223813/http://www.bulletjournal.com/
The only difference with the current “method” is using dots [ · ] instead of boxes for the tasks and dashes [ - ] instead of dots for the notes. And that the content changed from CC-BY-NC-SA to full copyright, fancy that.
Some useful things mentioned on the book that weren't mentioned in 2014 but that appeared in the community are:
- Yearly Journal migration. Nothing special, just change your journal at least once a year. Keep the previous one
- Threading. When two pages are related not just note them in the index but add the page number of the previous block to the page number on the left spread and when you add a next block go back to this spread and add the new block page number on the right side.
- Note linking: you can use page references in notes.
- Interjournal linking: Journal name + number. Examples: 2022p45, 2021Q3p6, whatever you name your journals.
- Prefer Leuchtturm1917 notebooks as they already have page numbers and an index on top of being of excellent quality.
And that's it. The rest of the book and the current website are a hodgepodge of new-ageisms and pseudoscience around basic practices of meditation, reflection and gratitude that try to grab you commercially.
If you want to complement your writing by adding meditation, reflection, prioritization and gratitude to your daily routines there are better books than this one.
I'm flabbergasted to see so many positive reviews of an unapologetically heteronormative book.
I can understand that people write from their experiences and idiosyncrasies. I can see how many people could have wrote a similar book in the 70s in Europe.
But this was written in 20-fucking-14 and it oozes transphobia and homophobia by the same omission it condemns in sexism. It also reeks of capitalist propaganda about deserving respect for effort, entrepreneurship and money after saying it wouldn't go into class struggle.
I'm really disappointed on people suggesting this is a good introduction to feminism in the 21st century. This is feminism for the 1% from a person that knows her privilege compared to her environment.
I stopped reading this book on chapter 3.
The style is callous and the author is prone to blame the Irish people of things like the Great Hunger or the lack of industry while openly condoning the British government.
This is written from a colonialist mindset and like the VSI to capitalism it has an obvious Tory bias so I assume that's the editorial line of the VSI collection.
At the end of the day this is yet another self help book written with a lot of filler that could be a long article.
But I'm giving it four stars because although it is not original I think it is easier to read than other literature of the area.
And more importantly, it fills a void between GTD and more complete PKM methods like the Zettelkasten including a space for imperfection that both ZK and GTD don't allow.
I have read worse books, starting with David Allen's GTD.
tl;dr drop social media. Own your time and be jealous of it. Do things that are productive in your free time. Don't be afraid of boredom as it often is a catalyst of creativity or insights.
The writing of this book is so full of white male privilege quoting and praising historical privileged white men that I was tempted to start a fucking revolution.
This is not even a mediocre self help book. It's a pretentiously bad self help book trying to surf the fashion wave of minimalism.
I started reading this book due to my trust in the Manning editorial and was I wrong.
There are loads of edition errors where, for instance, the explanation of a code block refers to columns while the code is about rows.
Many code examples are pointless. The example about forms is awful. There are two text fields, one of them is always ignored and by the end of the chapter the author says “I don't actually care about the state. I only included it for an extra example”. Man, if a part of code is dead please get rid of it.
I don't really blame the author, this is his first book. I'm appalled by the editorial team at Manning for allowing this to be published in this form.
All the main ideas, takeaways, references and processes of this book fit into a small two pages article. It's basically time management and a criticism of how social media affects our attention span and ability to concentrate.
The other 290 pages of this book are full of really bad self-help prose oozing white privilege, patriarchy, meritocracy and capitalist propaganda.
Instead of getting into the shallow endeavour of reading this book I recommend anyone interested to read I Read Cal Newport's Deep Work So You Don't Have To by Natalie Luhrs and Deep Work by Cal Newport: Summary & Notes by Graham Mann. It will take you five minutes to read both articles and you can dedicate your time to some profitable deep work.
It's ironic that by avoiding reading this book you will be following Cal Newport's advice to the letter.
It has been really nice to learn the destination of some of the people in the BeOS team. The story itself is interesting and the book is good at times, but at other moments it drags a lot.It makes me think of [b:Revolution in The Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made 40492 Revolution in The Valley The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made Andy Hertzfeld https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1388288490l/40492.SX50.jpg 40082] as the author is not a professional writer... and it shows.Some people compare it to [b:Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age 1101290 Dealers of Lightning Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age Michael A. Hiltzik https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1349086333l/1101290.SX50.jpg 1088176] to which I can only say “no way”. The impact of Xerox PARC on computing is in another league and cannot be compared to what the Android team developed and [a:Michael A. Hiltzik 206718 Michael A. Hiltzik https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/u_50x66-632230dc9882b4352d753eedf9396530.png] is a far better writer than Chet Haase. But we must stress that Haase is also a far better developer than Hiltzik.
This is a great book and the only thing I don't like is that I didn't read it twenty years ago, but better late than never.
It reminds me a lot of Sandman and Neverwhere as the action unravels through a lot of travels and movements and the books are soaked in classical myths set in a modern scenario.
I have liked this book a lot, it is a great companion to the author's previous book.
The previous book elicited criticism from some readers as, to their eyes, it didn't stress enough the worker exploitation of the industry. This one will probably be vilified for the contrary.
I think the author does a great job in both books and the criticism to the gaming industry and laud to game workers is present in both.
Entertaining recollection of the production experience of ten games developed in the late 2000s and early 2010s.
Some people have a negative concept of the book because they think it lacks criticism about death marches, crunch and how the last stages of a game take precedence over every other life aspects of the team. I think the book has an inherent, and at times explicit, criticism of the game industry, specially of the North American one, but at the same time celebrates the outcome of publishing great games and the passion of the developers.
Quick to read. Interesting to learn from the experience of others but there is nothing terribly groundbreaking in this book, it's basically another “hey, we have a lean workflow”.
The fact that you have to learn a lot of in-house lingo to understand what they are talking about is ludicrous and when you add it to the lack of comparison or references to third parties you understand that these people have invented their own way of doing things with absolute contempt towards existing practices or, most probably, that they haven't invested any time in reading about other management practices.
Established practices and a common vocabulary help a lot for the exchange and dissemination of ideas. Disregarding them shows Basecamp's hubris and makes this book at times feel more like soapboxing rather than a genuine effort to contribute to the general good.
I'm enjoying this series a lot, it is refreshing and written with a lot of nuance.
Something I love from the first book and this one is the way Elma becomes conscious of her privilege and how she grows a lot as a person by acknowledging her needs and being loyal to herself rather than to what she thinks other people expect from her.
This book is really interesting and I will definitely work on implementing some kind of Zettelkasten, Evergreen notes (https://notes.andymatuschak.org/z3SjnvsB5aR2ddsycyXofbYR7fCxo7RmKW2be) or other PKM solution.
The book is small, the idea is interesting, but the reading is cumbersome. As with many other “How to” books it is repetitive in form and in content. I think the base ideas are outlined in the first 30 pages and repeated with examples in the next 150 pages. And the examples are repeated two and three times.
There are a gazillion blog posts about this that resume it in a 10 minutes read. If you only want to implement your Zettelkasten better go for them. The book is good as a source of references and bibliography.
