Kislay's Newsletter #8

Happy Friday!

Hope all of you are doing good, staying safe, and wearing a mask when you go out. Here's your weekly round up from the blog and the best of the awesome tech internet.

From the blog

I published my review of “The Great Mental Models (Vol. 1)" by Shane Parrish. This is the first volume in a series of book fundamental patterns in thinking in all the basic fields of learning and it covers general mental models like “The map is not the territory” and “Occam’s Razor”. If you have not heard of these concepts and/or trawled through every page of Shane’s Farnham Street Blog like I have - you should definitely go ahead and read this book. If you are, however, a little more seasoned traveller of the cross-functional learning path, you are unlikely to be enthused by the fairly basic treatment. I would suggest you skim through the highlights I have included in this article and move on. Article Link

Reading now

I FINALLY started reading Domain Driven Design this week and even with just one section done, it is looking very good. “Knowledge Crunching” is such an apt description for processing SME knowledge into semi-technical terms - easily my favourite part of the software engineering process because even if you don’t write any code, you get to learn so much! Expect a review by the next weekend. Here are some other books on my radar - let’s see how much I can cover this year.

From the great interweb

  1. A beautiful, beautiful illustrated introduction to quantum computing by the Thoughtworks folks. An absolute must-read if you care even a little bit about computers.
  2. A brutal deconstruction of the “software craftsmanship” label by Einar Host. I have called myself by this name without thinking much about what it might mean, and I cringed a few times while reading this.
  3. I stumbled upon different nuggets about developers getting into management this week, starting with this Twitter thread (later moved to a blog post) by Charity Majors and pausing with this article by Phil LeBrun. I still have mixed thoughts about this and I am beginning to believe it is because of the whole “Management as Promotion” angle.
  4. Here’s a very broad overview of the developments in Augmented Reality and how everything will be scanned very soon.

  5. I found these beautiful astronomy pictures and having been staring at them intermittently all week - makes me feel a little less locked in. Hope you like them too.

That's it for this week folks. Happy weekend!

-Kislay

 
 
 
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