Gregory Witek Profile picture
Dec 29, 2021 21 tweets 10 min read Read on X
This year I've read so far 20 books. Here's what I do and don't recommend: 📕
1. "Multipliers" - a book about a leadership and being a genius vs genius maker (someone who helps other to reach their potential). Overall ok, but it should be 50 pages instead of 250
2. "System design interview" by @alexxubyte - great read when preparing for tech interviews. Very solid and yet concise examples. It helped me to pass a number of interviews. Highly recommended!
3. "A Philosophy of software design" by @JohnOusterhout - solid read, I didn't agree with all the points there but I recommend it for every mid-level developer. IMO way more valuable and universal than "Clean code" and others
4. "Culture map" by @ErinMeyerINSEAD - one of my favorites this year, it talks about cultural differences. Working in a few countries I saw these differences but I lacked a mental model to better think about them, and thes book helped me with that
5. "Software Engineering at Google" - surprisingly it made me realize that I have already followed a lot of good practices that are a standard at Google. Overal a pleasant and informative book
6. "Designing Data-Intensive Applications" by @martinkl - a thick book, but full of great insights. I used it as a prep for system design interview, but I can recommend it for every senior developer out there
7. "The Software Engineering Manager Interview Guide" by @vgraupera - a good intro for everyone interviewing for EM position for the first time. Short book with a lot of questions that are common during interviews
8. "The Mythical Man-Month" - a classic that I don't think should be recommended anymore. I know it's a source of a lot of great insights, but it hasn't aged well
9. "The art of readable code" by @dustinboswell - a book I'll be recommending to everyone who wants to read "Clean Code". It's more concise, less dogmatic, less Java-centric and just overall better
10. "Site Reliability Engineering" - a book about SRE at Google. Tons of interesting content, but at some point I got lost in all the numbers and examples there. A bit too heavy, but a good, 500-pages intro to SRE at scale
11. "Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns" by @KentBeck - I read it out of curiosity and even though I spent roughly 7min learning Smalltalk, I could easily follow it. I've also learned how much Smalltalk-inspired stuff @yukihiro_matz used in Ruby
12. "Become an Effective Software Engineering Manager" by @jstanier - I think I talked about it before. It's a book that I wish I wrote, written better than I could write it. Solid starter for every engineering manager
13. "So Good They Can't Ignore You" - a book that says you shouldn't follow your passion and then provides examples of successful people who were very passionate about their work 🤷🏻 besides that there's some good advice there though
14. "The coaching habit" - it should have been an email... or rather a blog post. A short book that provides solid coaching advice, but it really doesn't contain enough info to justify 117 pages
15. "The Origins of Political Order" - I bought it as an audiobook and I struggled with it. The topic and the content is very interesting, but it requires sitting down and focusing fully on the book. I need to re-read it in the future
16. "The Practice of Groundedness" by @BStulberg - I've praised it before on Twitter. It's a self-help book, but one of those few that has some original ideas and original content. So good after audiobook I bought a paper version
17. "Atomic habits" by @jamesclear - a very popular book that kind of lives up to expectations. It offers simple, yet effective ideas on how to step by step build good habits
18. "Broken stars" - a collection of Chinese sci-fi stories. For someone who knows Chinese culture rather superficially, it was very interesting to see how it impacts the way sci-fi is written. Not all stories were great, but a couple of them were brilliant
19. "A convenience store woman" - this time Japanese fiction, talking about a mundane life of a social outcast, working for a convenience store. Short and interesting story
20. "Staff Engineer" - half-book, half-interviews with staff engineers. I wrote more on Goodreads (goodreads.com/review/show/43…), overall I think I expected more. It certainly lacks the depth and detail that "An elegant puzzle" (author's previous book) had.

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More from @gregorywitek

Jan 27, 2022
This week I had a retro with my team and everyone shared that they were feelling more productive and found it easier to focus. It wasn't rocket science to make it work, but I thought I'd share a few tips how we made that happen: 🧵
1. First, we got rid of standups. We replaced 15min morning standups with Slack messages that everyone sends when they start working in the morning. I covered this topic in the past: notonlycode.org/ive-moved-to-a…
That means no matter if I start work at 8am or at 9.30am, I can start actual work without having to soon jump on a call just to say what I did yesterday.
Standups are the worst.
Read 15 tweets
Jan 15, 2022
When interviewing with companies I ask "how will you help me grow?" and most of them respond "we have annual education budget of €X" (usually ~€1k).

That really means "we won't help you grow". Annual budget is cheap and ineffective, here's why and what to do instead: 🧵
First, cheap: €1,000 is maybe 1-2% of a developer's salary, it's not a big expense for the company. Make that tax deductible, and add the fact that few people will actually use the full budget, and what you get is a marginal cost.
+ I've seen companies making it hard to actually use this budget. You have to fill a form, justify how this fits your role and objectives, and wait a few days to see whether it's approved.
I've seen people saying "screw it" and paying with their own money instead.
Read 10 tweets
Jan 7, 2022
Every article about becoming a good writer says "read a lot". Yet in programming we rarely practice reading. We only read the code we have to understand in order to change, we rarely encourage each other to read and analyze some well-written code
I think coding is very much like writing and yet we don't teach it like we teach writing. We teach to produce working code, which is bare minimum. We rarely emphasize that the code is written with other developers in mind.
Some developers realize it themselves and instinctively try to make their code easier to understand, but I have seen very little focus on it at uni or bootcamps.
Read 4 tweets
Jan 6, 2022
"Refactoring Python Code" book update: a few days ago I started moving all code examples to separate files (out of Markdown files) and covering them all with unit tests. That has been great, as I found tons of small typos. #buildinginpublic (1/4)
Using external files is a great idea - each file is fully working code, and in the book I just include the part I need (e.g. I skip imports and some helper functions).

I have the best of both worlds, I have working code and concise examples (2/4)
It also means whoever buys the book will receive a package of files with code and tests so that they can play with them! I'm super happy with this decision.

I'm using markdown-pp (github.com/jreese/markdow…, now deprecated) to handle including external files (3/4)
Read 5 tweets
Jan 3, 2022
One interesting thing I've learned from the Alibaba story was how in EBay went from 90%+ of the market in China in 2002, to leaving China entirely just 5 years later. (1/5)
There are many reasons why EBay lost, but one interesting one is that they refused their Chinese team to drive the product. Instead they tried to unify the platform globally, so that the whole site worked and looked the same everywhere. (2/n)
These days it's changing, but generally Chinese web design is very different than western design - sites are more busy and flashy, there's a lot of information there. Compare main page of Amazon vs JD: (3/n)
Read 6 tweets
Jan 1, 2022
The president of Square Enix (Final Fantasy games and more) wrote about play-to-earn and NFTs as upcoming major trend in gaming in 2022. A large part of the letter feels like crypto bros' wet dreams, but a small part there could lead to something positive: ImageImage
The bad parts are obviously that they want to shove NFTs and blockchain in players' faces, which I believe is a dangerous and completely unnecessary trend.

Also saying that goodwill and volunteer spirit are inconsistend in comparison with willing to make money makes me cringe
I don't think that play-to-earn will make games more exciting, instead it'll turn them into weird worlds with little to no authentic enthusiasm. It's like a party where some guests are there to have fun and some are hired actors, but you don't know who's who.
Read 7 tweets

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