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I renamed my book on hiring and managing remote teams, it was painful
Originally my book was called “Building and Managing Distributed Teams“. I loved that title and people in my social circle loved it too. A friend of mine even told me something along the lines of “I’m so envious I wish I had that title”. And for the two years or so that it took me…
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I have a problem: 3 or 5 stars?
I’m an avid reader and I review every single book I read. I force myself to write at least two paragraphs. This is useful to me because sometimes I forget I have read something; seeing and reading back my own reviews answers the ‘did I already read that’ question but also refreshes my memory on…
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Book Review: Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time by Jeff Sutherland
I first came in contact with Scrum when I was working at Google and since then, I’ve been applying it to the startups I co-founded with good outcomes. Since I was searching for a job, I kept seeing “Scrum Master” come up over and over and I thought it was about time that I learned…
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Book Review: Build the Fort: Why 5 Simple Lessons You Learned as a 10 year-old Can Set You Up for Startup Success by Chris Heivly
This is a short and sweet book that compares the act of starting a company, a startup, with that of building a fort. It’s a very enjoyable read with the childhood stories of building a fort and it reminded me of those days in which it seemed easier to find a co-founder. I’m not sure…
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Book Review: The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker
If you are one of those people constantly watching news and worrying about the sorry state of the world. Read this book. It’ll convince you with data, instead of baseless sensationalism, that life has never been more peaceful, safer and better than right now. I procrastinated on starting reading this book because I already fully…
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Book Review: Leonardo da Vinci by Walter Isaacson
This book was fascinating. I always thought of Leonardo Da Vinci as an artist who did other things aside from painting. This book changed my mind. Leonardo saw himself as a philosopher/scientist/engineer (those were sort of one and the same back then) who also paints; and after reading this book, I have to agree. I…
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Book Review: Advance! The Full Licence Book by Alan Betts, Steve Hartley
This book felt of much lower quality than the previous two. There are many typos and editing errors and I noticed a few technical errors as well. I guess it makes sense the advanced saw less scrutiny than the beginner one as fewer people will ever get to this point. Or maybe it’s my bias…
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The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan
So far the tone of this book is disgustingly hippish. I think it presents some interesting data, but the way it presents it is so annoying: – everything modern is bad – everything mainstream is bad – the only good alternative is primitive farms – food and nature is a mystery that we cannot grasp…
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Book Review: Intermediate Licence – Building On The Foundation by Steve Hartley
I’m not a good person to judge this book because I not only have a technical background in electronics, I also got my American Extra-level license (AC1DM) before this one, so, I had to study all this material a few months ago. This feel like a revision. Something that really surprises me about the book…
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Book Review: American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird, Martin J. Sherwin
For this review I’m considering, without any fact checking or cross referencing, that this biography is factual and true to the events although clearly some of the statements in the book would be hard to evaluate as they describe the feelings of large groups of people. I knew a bit about The Manhattan Project and…