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,…
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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….
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…
Gone Viking by Bill Arnott
Rating: 7.7/10. This book is a travel diary journal about the Viking world, mostly taking place in locations visited by the Vikings, such as the UK, Iceland, and Scandinavia (although it’s not limited to these places and also describes places that have no connection to the Vikings, like Hawaii, Haida Gwaii, and Italy). The term…
Tax by Design by Institute for Fiscal Studies
Rating: 9.2/10. Tax by Design: The Mirrless Review by Institute for Fiscal Studies Book about the issues that arise in designing tax systems, and a framework to reason about tax design, with a focus on the UK’s system. Over the last 30 years, there has been a disproportionately large increase in the incomes of the…
Lean Analytics by Alistair Croll and Benjamin Yoskovitz
Rating: 8.2/10. Lean Analytics: Use Data to Build a Better Startup Faster by Alistair Croll and Benjamin Yoskovitz Book about how to use data to make decisions in startups. Every metric you collect should be useful information in making a decision, so avoid collecting vanity metrics like the number of page views or sign-ups. It’s…
The Staff Engineer’s Path by Tanya Reilly
Rating: 8.3/10. The Staff Engineer’s Path: A Guide for Individual Contributors Navigating Growth and Change by Tanya Reilly Book about the staff engineer role, a position in many tech companies that is separate from software engineering manager and a parallel track. A staff engineer oversees the technical direction for a project, without directly managing reports….
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Rating: 7.7/10. A short novel that describes life in a Soviet Gulag in the Arctic in the 1950s. The author himself spent several years in the Gulag; this is one of the first published books that revealed the inner details of the Gulag system, and controversially, it was allowed to be published in the Soviet…
Dance Music Manual by Rick Snoman
Rating: 7.7/10. Dance Music Manual: Tools, Toys, and Techniques by Rick Snoman A textbook about music production aimed at intermediate level producers. I don’t often listen to electronic dance music, but the tools and techniques in this genre often transfer to other genres like pop as well. Compared to other genres, dance music tends to…
Learning Google AdWords and Google Analytics by Benjamin Mangold
Rating: 8.3/10. Textbook about the two tools in the Google marketing stack: Google AdWords and Google Analytics, with about half of the book devoted to each. The four types of marketing are: search, display, social and content. Despite popular belief, online ads are a huge market, making most of Google’s revenue, but requires some expertise…
The Iliad by Homer
Rating: 7.5/10. An epic poem about the Trojan War, comprised of 24 books (about 600 pages), written about 700 BC, it is the oldest piece of western and Greek literature. The Iliad as well as the Odyssey were written by Homer, supposedly a blind poet, but the poems had a long oral history before it…