Texts I Remember
| Title | |
|---|---|
| Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884) | Now, perhaps, I am better at approaching views that at first glance seem uncomprehensiple. |
| Veden ajat: matka läpi muuttuneen maiseman (2025) | Lot's of interesting facts about what affects the quality of creeks, rivers and lakes. I.e. rivers with deadfall trees have slower flows, which reduces soil turmoil, which reduces eutrophication. Drifting baseline (in terms of generational memory) is a really interesting phenomenon. |
| Klara and the Sun (2021) | At the end machines do not feel so distand from humans anymore. |
| The Machine Stops (1909) | Great reminder to think about how much we rely on things to work out. |
| The United States Needs Fewer Bus Stops (2026) | I now appriciate how well things are with urban planning in Finland. |
| Kuvitettu pikaopas risteyspyöräilyyn (2010) | I have to reconsider the previous note... |
| Attention Media ≠ Social Networks (2026) | Good description of the main ideas that cause trouble in social media. |
| The visual display of quantitative information (2001) | I love how after this book I actually started using my brain to think how to do things properly. |
| How to Disagree (2008) | "If you have something real to say, being mean just gets in the way". I hardly ever attend discourse online. But I do read comments time to time and I would enjoy it very much if the moderator keepts the quality of comments high. |
| Steve Jobs (2011) | I love good biographies as they force me to live trough most of the things the person has lived trough. This book represents the class of biographies. They are great for developing empathy and understanding. |
| How did places like Bell Labs know how to ask the right questions? (2023) | |
| Universities should be more than toll gates (2025) | I wonder if university has to hit home the first time one attends? Many smart people I know, who did attend university, have done it in multiple epochs and by changing field. |
| Tips from a Pulitzer prizewinner (2019) | "You can’t please an anonymous reader, but you should be able to please yourself". A great list of things to consider when writing. From now on, when I'm writing, I will go over this text and check each point in my text. |
| Feynman's Garden (2024) | I agree with this approach wholeheartedly. Although, it is hard to arrange ones life in such a way that focusing on few things for long periods at a time is possible. Maybe getting oneself in such state requires using this algorithm... I like gardens! |
| Increasing your practice surface area (2025) | This aligns well with the colloquial saying "some work to live, but others live to work". Of course I don't mean "work" in the sense that you have to make money, or climb a corporate ladder, but more like what the word "calling" represents. Also doing something that one enjoys is propably quite good for ones mental well being. |
| Learning to read Arthur Whitney's C to become Smart (2024) | |
| minimum effective dose (2025) | |
| Embrace the Grind (2021) | "The only “trick” is that this preparation seems so boring, so impossibly tedious, that when we see the effect we can’t imagine that anyone would do something so tedious just for this simple effect." |
| Kernighan's lever (2012) | |
| NASA has a list of 10 rules for software development (????) | |
| Code is cheap. Show me the talk. (2026) | I am not competent enough user of these tools to reflect on the first part of this text, but the "Show me the talk" -principle seems sensible. "A good, competent developer with good articulation skills and care for quality will use LLMs, or any other tools, in their own ways to produce quality outcomes. An incompetent developer with poor articulation skills or one with a lack of care for quality, will produce bad stuff, LLMs or not". |
| Systems Thinking (2026) | |
| Twenty Five Years of Computing (2026) | |
| The Cathedral and the Bazaar (2001) | This book tells a story of the time when the free software movement was born. It explains, in words, things that have felt right all along. After all, why do I need to buy a new washing machine when only the tubes inside it need cleaning? |
| The Mythical Man-Month (1975) | I like to think that I read this just at right moment in my career. Not right at the beginning but early enough to apply it's lessons from now on. |
| A Female Genius: How Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron’s Daughter, Started the Computer Age (2014) | |
| C and C++ Prioritize Performance over Correctness (2023) | |
| Beautiful Abelian Sandpiles (2025) | They are so beautiful. |
| The Mathematics of Tuning Systems (2026) | |
| The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences (1960) | |
| The map that keeps Burning Man honest (2026) | |
| The third hard problem (2026) | |
| Gospel of Wealth (1889) | |
| A city is not a tree (1965) | |
| The Duty of a Scholar (2026) |
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