Category: books

Atomic Habits

I finished this ebook last week. It has been interesting to read about some techniques that I have used without really noticing like adding/removing things from my visual radar.

I believe that the key is to create your mindset and grow little by little (atomic). This in an investment in the long run, on you.

The big picture for building habits:

  • Obvious, Attractive, Easy and Satisfying:

The big picture for removing habits:

  • Invisible, Unattractive, Hard and Unsatisfying.

And this book makes references to “Man’s search for meaning”.

Some other notes from the summary:

  • Happiness is simple the absence of desire (The richest is not the one who has more things but the one with less needs – my grandmother told me that once)
  • Being curious is better than being smart.
  • Emotions drives behaviour. Your response tends to follow your emotions.
  • Suffering drives progress.
  • Satisfaction = Craving – Reward
  • Feelings come both before and after behaviour: Cue -> Craving (feeling) -> Response -> Reward (feeling)

Man’s search for meaning

I finished this book a bit more than a week ago. It is quite short but very dense in meaning. I didnt know it was from a Holocaust survivor and he was a psychiatrist. The first parts is mainly about his experience in the concentration camps. It is not gory in details. It is detailed in his mindset and psychology of the prisioners. It is amazing how in the most extreme circumstances (this is real stress), human beings can survive (by a thin line though). And as well, luck. He mentions the three phases of a prisoner: admission (shock), camp routine (brutality, gave up, apathy) and release (another shock, as your reason for meaning can be non-existing… family gone, society gone, etc)

It is a book I need to read again.

I have some notes:

logotherapy

Existentialism: To live is to suffer, to survive is to find meaning in the suffering. That is for me, it is Buddhism. And each man/woman needs to find its own.

The last human of human freedoms is the ability to choose one’s attitude in a given set of circumstances. It is like stoicism.

Nietzsche: He who has a why to live can bear with almost any how.

It is hope, it is meaning.

It is not what we expect from life but rather what life expects from us. Our answer must consist in right action and right conduct. Again, like stoicism.

And sometimes, you just have to accept fate and bear your cross.

Man needs tension, can’t thrive in tensionless state and find meaning in life.

“Sunday neurosis” – kind of depression happens at the end of a (busy) week and during the free time you notice the lack of meaning that you can’t ignore – existential vacuum. This happened to me for many years, mainly during my first job. Then in UK, studying for certifications the first years and afterwards, climbing on Sunday cleared that feeling. It was the first time I felt at peace before starting a new week.

Rise

I am not very keen of sportsmen/women biographies but I decided to read this one, after watching this video some time ago.

Although Siya is still young, he relates about his career from a very challenging upbringing to the summit of his sport career.

But what I liked from the book, it is not just the path to success but the persona. How he relates to the problems of South Africa, to his own personal problems. In a very macho sport, it is difficult to imagine somebody talking about his feelings, his wrongs, his addictions. This is another very interesting video about mental heath issues from a “big boy”.

As he shows in the book, he found help in his wife and faith. And admits he is not perfect.

There is a important point about success and values. It is more important to be a well-rounded person than a top rugby player. But we live in a society/world that we only focus in the best, the winner (who takes all) And those are the values we give to kids. As a famous coach said, the result takes care by itself. That means, if you put the work .

You would expect the book would finish in his top achievement but not, if follows with what it is really important to him, make a different in the society. From supporting campaigns against violence to women (and it is not just a problem in SA, we had similar problem in Spain) and setup the kolisifoundation.

The Phoenix Project

I wanted to read this book for some time. I thought it was going to be a technical book but it was a novel and felt like a thriller! and IT thriller if you can believe it. While I was reading it, I felt quite tense at some points, like, “I have been there!”. Although I am not a developer, I felt the pain mentioned in the book. I have been like that I spend many years in a good devops environment. When I started there, I didnt have a clue what devops menat but I learnt on the job training. I wish the networks world could be more “devops” but as we nearly always relay in 3rd party vendors to provide equipment, they always want you to lock in their product. Still, it is possible, but you need to have the drive (and time) and some support from your employer.

One of the things that surprise me from the devops methodology is that is based in manufacturing. I read in the past about Kaizen but now, I can see the connection. One of the main references is the book, The Goal.

And another very important point, nothing of these things work if people are not on board. You can have the smartest people around but if people dont buy in, nothing is accomplished.

So I like the idea of quick iterations (return of investment is received by the company and customer sooner) where you get earlier feedback, interactions and communication between all teams, awareness for the business that IT is everywhere, constant testing/experimentation (chaos monkey, antifragility), kanban boards / flow models to visualize process and constraints (WIP), constant learning, etc.

It was interesting at some point in the book where the main characters where interviewing the top people in the company to gather info about what is important for them and what means successful results and bad days. Then map all that to IT process. From there you can see what is clearly important and what is not. So you can focus in value.

Other things I learned is about the types of work we do:

  • Business projects
  • Internal projects
  • Changes
  • Unplanned work

And that unplanned work is the killer for any attempt to have a process like a manufacturing plant.

As well, based on “The Goal”, there are a lot of mentions about the “Three Ways”:

  • Find your constraint: maximize flow -> reduce batch, reduce intervals, increase quality to detect failures before moving to next steps.
  • Exploit your constraint: fast and constant flow of feedback.
  • Subordinate your constraint: high-trust culture -> dynamic, disciplined and scientific approach to experiment and risks.

In summary, I enjoyed the book. It was engaging, easy to digest and I learned!

Doom

I have never been a hardcore gamer but I remember spending many hours playing DOOM2 in PC. I never played online but I have definitely clear memories of how fast paced was the game and the kind of dark/horror atmosphere. It was quite unique at that time. And to be honest, I didnt feel it was that violent, keeping that I was a teenager and the shooting of Columbine was recent. For the record, I never completed the last phase.

I finish this book about the creators of DOOM and its origins. I had heard about John Carmack from a good friend but I never dag further in the subject so it was interesting to find out about the origins of Carmack and John Romero, how the learned to program and got to create a new culture/wave of games. I like how the games evolved in the book (although it was released in 2004) and nowadays you see how far everything has gone from technology to business size.

I didnt know Carmack was behind all the 3D engines, the evolution of them, the first usage of dedicated 3D graphic cards, etc. I think the last first person shooter I played was “Return to the Castle of Wolfenstein” and it was really good. And this was I managed to finish it. After there was a crazy about playing online that somehow I never got interested. I remember one of the games that hook me at that time was Commandos. What a great series of games was that.

It is interesting how their success was as well later their doom…. they enjoyed working long hours and playing, how the different personalities set them for the stardom. But once money and fame came, things changed and seems all fell apart.

So yes, it was a nice read and good culture fix.

RISC-V

I have been reading this book during my lunch brakes for several month. Most of the times just a couple of pages to be honest as generally my knowledge of CPU architecture is very poor. I really enjoyed this subject in Uni and this book was one of my favourites during that time. It was like a bible of CPU architecture. And Patterson is an author in both books.

I remember that there were too main architectures RISC vs CISC. In a very summarize way, RISC were simple instruction that were easy to parallelized and executed (with more instructions to execute) and CISC were complex instruction (few to execute) but that were difficult to scale. So let’s say simplicity (RISC) “won” the race in CPU architecture.

RISC-V is an open standard so anybody can produce CPUs for executing those instruction. So you can easily get your hands dirty getting a board.

One of the reason of RISC-V is to learn from all the architectures mistakes and provide a design that works for any type of processor (embedded to super-computers), is efficient, modular and stable.

The book compares RISC-V with current ISAS from ARM-32, MIPS-32, Intel x86-32, etc. Based on cost, simplicity, performance , isolation from implementation, room for growth, code size and ease of programming.

There were many parts of the book that I couldn’t really understand but I found the chapter 8 quite interesting. This is about how to compute data concurrently. The best know architecture is Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD). The alternative is Vector architecture. And this is used in RISC-V. The implementation details are too our of my league.

In summary, it was a nice read to refresh a bit my CPU architecture knowledge.

The Black Swan

I finished this book a couple of days ago. Very interesting. It is about how not linear or logical are philosophy, economics and life. About how we try to find logic/causality to everything. How history only teaches what we have only discovered. How we can’t predict properly, and much less financial market using Gaussian and Bayeasian models when these are non-linar systems, how we should run away from “experts”, how the academy is built in a status-quo that can’t be refreshed. It is intense, it touches a lot of subjects. And sometimes I feel I get it, and later on I am not sure. Examples like the turkey that is feed for 100 days, and very likely “thinks” that will last forever, until without knowing, Thanksgiving comes, are brilliant. Similar examples for Casanova (who survived any type of incident) and NYC (like Casanova but at city level).

A black swan is considered something very unlikely to happen that actually happens or similarly, that something very likely to happen, it doesnt.

The book was written in 2007 just before the 2008 financial meltdown so its attacks to the “risk” management can’t fit better.

It uses references from Daniel Kahneman who some years later wrote a great book about how we (badly) reason. And won a nobel prize in Economics… funny enough, that’s a prize who Nassim attacks a lot around the book. As well, I enjoyed the part regarding the application of chaos theory/fractals from Benoit Mandelbrot (that I read from his book) in the markets. He mentions many other authors like Karl Popper (whom I have never paid attention), Herni Poincare, etc. As well, he mentions Godel.

The entries about Skepticism and Empiricism are really great. From how started, how it is related to the black swans and how Medicine killed more people than cure them until not long ago. And when I was reading about Sextus Empiricus, I wasnt sure if he was joking, but I was really surprised by the discovery of this philosopher/physician.

I think I need to read it again.

War and Peace

For some time I wanted to read “War and Peace“. It has taken me just over a month although initially I had my doubts about the book. I wasn’t sure if I was going to enjoy it. Why did I read it? Apart from recommendation from the few people I follow/read in the Internet, it is because I think reading this type of books will make me wiser, smarter, find the solutions to the mysteries of the universe and life (it is not 42), etc etc. It never happens. But at least, I try to learn something new, soaks up new experiences, conversations, etc.

I liked the intro about the book and Tolstoy life. A highlight of that is he tried to remove copyrights of his novels, he belonged to old nobility family and fought in the Crimean war.

The book is focused in the Napaleonic Wars in Russia. I was surprised how strong was the French influence in Russia. The nobility was mainly French educated and there are parts of the book where some characters mention how bad is their Russian.

It is a long book, thought was going to be boring but was engaging. I guess it is an stereotopic: Russian things are boring, grey, dull. It is luck of knowledge of Eastern countries (real) culture. It felt like a “Pillar of the Earth” + a soup-opera. But it wasn’t cheesy at all. So see how deep and different is each character. How they evolve. There is some (life) philosophy (mainly from Pierre during his spell in the front) that really got me. It is something that I really believe in: simple life. And there are a lot pages about (the complexity / meaning) of love.

But mainly the book is about History. I have learnt history mainly based in big characters and actions. But Tolstoy’s point is History is not really that, is not that rational/causistic as we try to believe (and write). He focus several times in Napoleon. How he was a genius in some battles but then how he failed in Russia campaign. Tolstoy argues that is not just Napoleon’s action that produce those outcomes. It was everything around. But we try to focus and justify outcomes in just one fact.

The novel doesnt really have an end. It just ends. It is not made in Holiwood. So it is nice.

Foundation and Empire

I finished yesterday the second book of the Foundation series. It was a short book but quite engaging. I am really impress how Asimov can create so different characters in the book. And really nice twist in the story line. Looking forwards for the next one.

Feeding your demons

This is not another cooking recipe. This is a book a finished this week. Initially I was a bit worried that it was going to be a pain. As usual, I dont remember where I got the recommendation for the book. But after starting reading it, I didnt regret it. It hit me. The concept of feeding your demons it based on the teachings of Machig Labdron. She was a Buddhist master that developed a new way of meditation. She faces problems with a different approach, instead of fighting them (very western style) tries to connect, understand, nurture and merge with them.

I remember while doing my headspace meditation some time ago, one week exercise was to focus in somebody you hated and wish then the best. It was hard but I felt at peace after that. This is the “Chod” method in a very simple way. I liked the example of Hercules fighting the Hydra. Whenever he cut a head, another grew and there was an immortal head. So that’s how we normally deal with our problems (internal or external) fighting them, trying to defeat them. But unfortunately, our mental/philosophical/live issues always come back alive like the hydra. So we need a different approach.

The book give you plenty of examples where you can use the Chod method. And explain the different types of demons, finishing with the main one, the ego. At the end of the day, that’s the source of all our problems. And this is something that reminds me too to Stoicism.

From my point of view, my main demon is relationships/feelings. My excuse is I dont want to lose my autonomy/independency. I dont want to get hurt. I dont want to show my weakness. It is fear to be loved and love.

It is something I still need to work on, not fight.

I take this as a new and important skill in my mental toolbox. And I need to practice it. Theory is not enough.