Rating: 8.3/10. Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube’s Chaotic Rise to World Domination by Mark Bergen Book about the history of YouTube, from its inception to the present day, covering its ups and downs, as well as the controversies it faced. As YouTube exploded in popularity, right now hundreds of hours of videos are uploaded every…
Author: Bai Li
The Color of Air by Gail Tsukiyama
Rating: 7.8/10. A historical novel set in Hilo, Hawaii in 1935 and centers around the Japanese community there. The story follows Daniel, a young doctor who returns after a brief trip to the mainland United States. There is not much of a plot, rather the book mostly revolves around Daniel rediscovering his family’s past and…
This is Paradise by Kristiana Kahakauwila
Rating: 7.9/10. A set of 6 short stories that take place in modern Hawaii. The people in each story are different, but all of them depict struggles, sadness, and despair, aiming to dispel the myth that Hawaii is a paradise. These stories showcase the everyday challenges that normal Hawaiians face, even though they may appear…
Founding Sales by Peter Kazanjy
Rating: 8.5/10. Founding Sales: The Early Stage Go-to-Market Handbook by Peter Kazanjy Book about how to do sales from first principles, for the founder of a startup who has never done sales before. The approach to startup sales is different from that of a bigger company, and you should do work that doesn’t scale. Firstly,…
The Nurture Assumption by Judith Rich Harris
Rating: 7.4/10. The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do by Judith Rich Harris Book about parenting, arguing for the thesis that parents essentially have no effect on how children turn out. Except in cases of extremely severe abuse, parents have no effect on children, after accounting for factors like genetics. Culture…
Video Making for Beginners by TechEd Publishers
Rating: 6.8/10. A short self-published book about the basics of filmmaking. Before making a film, you need to decide on the story you want to tell, who is the target audience, and what you hope to accomplish with the film. Write an outline first, then progress to a more detailed storyboard and script, making notes…
Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel
Rating: 7.7/10. Fairly short science fiction novel, it begins like a historical novel with a young man settling on Vancouver Island in the early 20th century, which, at the time, was still sparsely populated. The first half of the book jumps between four characters in different centuries in a slice-of-life style, taking place in 1912,…
Machine Learning Engineering on AWS by Joshua Arvin Lat
Rating: 8.0/10. An overview of the AWS services used by machine learning engineers to preprocess training data, train models, and deploy them to production. The book has good coverage of all of the most AWS services with various different options of doing things, such as code vs no-code tools, and server vs serverless deployment options….
Fashionopolis by Dana Thomas
Rating: 7.4/10. Fashionopolis: Why What We Wear Matters by Dana Thomas Book about fast fashion and its negative effects. We are used to buying a lot of cheap clothes without thinking too much, but fast fashion has a lot of negative effects on the environment and workers in developing countries. Fashion is very fast-paced and…
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Rating: 8.4/10. Fairly short and fast-paced classic novel at about 200 pages, at the beginning, a group of boys (aged about 6-12) crash-land on a deserted island. They quickly form two tribes: one is led by Ralph, who is elected the leader, and wants to set up a fire to signal passing ships and be…
Kingdom of Characters by Jing Tsu
Rating: 7.6/10. Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern by Jing Tsu Book about the history of the Chinese language during the early 20th century, when China was beginning to modernize, and how the language and writing system coped with the challenges. It starts with Wang Zhao, a scholar who saw the…
Merchants of Culture by John B. Thompson
Rating: 8.1/10. Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century by John B. Thompson Book about the book publishing industry, primarily the USA and the UK. Publishers act as middlemen: they purchase content from agents, who represent the business interests of authors; they add value to the process in several ways: by content…