Rating: 7.7/10. The Promise and Peril of Entrepreneurship: Job Creation and Survival among US Startups by Robert W. Fairlie, Zachary Kroff, Javier Miranda, Nikolas Zolas This book presents a primary economic research on startups and entrepreneurship in the United States, not limited to tech startups but encompassing all kinds of new businesses. Many surveys have…
Author: Bai Li
Cloud Native by Scholl, Swanson, Jausovec
Rating: 7.4/10. Cloud Native: Using Containers, Functions, and Data to Build Next-Generation Applications by Boris Scholl, Trent Swanson, Peter Jausovec Book about cloud design patterns, and I got bored about halfway through, mostly because it had a heavy focus on distributed systems and coordinating multiple services using cloud infrastructure, which is not very relevant to…
Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott
Rating: 7.8/10. Book covering multiple topics in politics, ecology, and sociology — the main argument of the book is a case against “Authoritarian High Modernism,” which essentially refers to the idea of imposing top-down control over society and using scientific and mathematical principles to enhance efficiency. This concept is most notably exemplified in the authoritarian…
Programming Typescript by Boris Cherny
Rating: 8.0/10. Programming TypeScript: Making Your JavaScript Applications Scale by Boris Cherny Book about the TypeScript language, which adds a strong typing system and a type inference engine to JavaScript. The material is fairly advanced and assumes a solid understanding of JavaScript features. It covers many advanced TypeScript features, including a rough sketch of how…
SQL Antipatterns by Bill Karwin
Rating: 7.5/10. SQL Antipatterns: Avoiding the Pitfalls of Database Programming by Bill Karwin Book about different ways to misuse database schemas, intended for intermediate-level programmers, discusses various common patterns that junior programmers often employ when designing database schemas. I found the anti-patterns to be good, but the proposed solutions are often lacking; they tend to…
Trade Wars Are Class Wars by Matthew C. Klein and Michael Pettis
Rating: 8.1/10. Trade Wars Are Class Wars: How Rising Inequality Distorts the Global Economy and Threatens International Peace by Matthew C. Klein and Michael Pettis Book by two economists and analyzes the macroeconomic situation of trade wars, primarily between the US and China, but also involving other countries. The root of these trade conflicts is…
Getting Acquired by Andrew Gazdecki
Rating: 7.6/10. Getting Acquired: How I Built and Sold My SaaS Startup by Andrew Gazdecki Book written by a founder and serial entrepreneur of several SaaS startups, details his journey in the first half of the book, how he built and eventually sold Bizness Apps. In his college years, the author was already deeply involved…
Hit Refresh by Satya Nadella
Rating: 7.2/10. Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft’s Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone by Satya Nadella Book about the story of Microsoft’s current CEO, Satya Nadella, and was published in 2017, approximately three years after he took the helm; it describes his values, past successes, and future visions for the company….
Career and Family by Claudia Goldin
Rating: 8.5/10. Career and Family: Women’s Century-Long Journey toward Equity by Claudia Goldin Book by a Nobel Prize-winning economist about the gender pay gap and the ongoing struggle for gender equality, with a specific focus on the USA. Its central observation is that men’s and women’s earnings are roughly equal until the birth of their…
Growth of the Soil by Knut Hamsun
Rating: 7.4/10. Novel of Norwegian literature, won the Nobel Prize in 1920; it tells the story of a homesteader named Isak in Northern Norway around 1850. The narrative begins with Isak settling in an untouched wilderness, far from any other settlement, where he starts building a home from scratch. Shortly after, his wife, Inger, arrives…
China’s Cosmopolitan Empire: The Tang Dynasty by Mark Edward Lewis
Rating: 7.5/10. An academic history book about everything you wanted to know about the Tang Dynasty (618-907 AD), considered one of the Chinese Golden Ages, is organized by topic and written in a fairly academic tone. It may be a bit long-winded for a casual audience, as it makes an effort to be detailed rather…
The Meat Racket by Christopher Leonard
Rating: 7.8/10. The Meat Racket: The Secret Takeover of America’s Food Business by Christopher Leonard Book about the American meat production industry, focusing on Tyson Foods, a major player in the field. Since the Great Depression, the industry has seen significant consolidation and vertical integration, with Tyson emerging as a dominant yet relatively unknown player….