No piece of writing has changed my life as immensely or as quickly as this book. This book gave me new ways of seeing the world and helped me understand myself, those around me, and companies more fully. Behaviors and choices I never understood instantly became clear once reading this book. Those mental models I got from this book help bring me peace by de-mystifying the world around me. It is my favorite book and found me at precisely the right time.
Like "Thinking Fast and Slow", this post gave me a model I was able to apply to the world around me and quickly see choices and behaviors in a new light. For software engineers, I believe understanding the concepts from this post can help them navigate their careers better, and align themselves in environments that don't always make sense. For managers, I believe this post can help them embrace the illegible and create better environments for their best performers.
I started noticing weird things in the data engineering space early in my career. Why are seemingly simple things like deleting a column actually incredibly challenging and laborious to do right? I have been pulling that thread for a while, accumulating a messy heap of yarn, only to find someone had already wound it all up into one comprehensive ball. This blog post contains a series of connected problems approached from the functional programmer's perspective with serious detail and interactive widgets. Reading this for the first time was incredibly validating, as it showed that others were just as mystified as me at how all these problems remained largely unsolved. One day I hope to make some clothes out of all this pulled thread.
As someone who has always been challenged with reading speed, writing production, and spelling, I believe I have still managed to lead a thoughtful and hopefully smart life. For this reason, I take issue with the current cultural consensus around words being the basis of thought and reason. This article captures such a niche world of thinking that I adore, and does a great job outlining all the things I truly believe the written word is good for. Even if I'm no good at it.
A deeply disturbing but ultimately too relatable piece of prose around navigating a career. There is likely so much nuance to this blog I miss, but for me it captures the truly silly despair from a miserable life with golden handcuffs.