Here are a few of my favorite books.

Science fiction

  • Hyperion by Dan Simmons

    I was using an Intel-based 16” MacBook Pro prior to this and the difference is night and day. I’ve never heard the fans turn on a single time, even under the incredibly heavy loads I put it through with our various launch simulations.

  • The Dark Forest by Liu Cixin

    The only display on the market if you want something HiDPI and bigger than 27”. When you’re working at planetary scale, every pixel you can get counts.

  • The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin

    They don't make keyboards the way they used to. I buy these any time I see them go up for sale and keep them in storage in case I need parts or need to retire my main.

  • Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

    They don't make keyboards the way they used to. I buy these any time I see them go up for sale and keep them in storage in case I need parts or need to retire my main.

  • Red Plenty by Francis Spufford

    They don't make keyboards the way they used to. I buy these any time I see them go up for sale and keep them in storage in case I need parts or need to retire my main.

Fiction

  • One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

    The IDE that I use for .NET programming. Visual Studio is not cross platform; Visual Studio and Visual Studio for Mac are two seperate products with different UIs.

  • The Fall by Albert Camus

    The IDE that I use for SQL. Has saved me from building about a thousand admin interfaces for my various projects over the years.

  • A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

    The IDE that I use for R. Has saved me from building about a thousand admin interfaces for my various projects over the years.

  • Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami

    The IDE that I use for R. Has saved me from building about a thousand admin interfaces for my various projects over the years.

  • 2666 by Roberto Bolaño

    The IDE that I use for R. Has saved me from building about a thousand admin interfaces for my various projects over the years.

Nonfiction

  • The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity by Toby Ord

    My favorite personal knowledge management software after trying Roam Research and Notion. It's free and open source.

  • The Life You Can Save by Peter Singer

    Using a daily notes system instead of trying to keep things organized by topics has been super powerful for me. And with Reflect, it’s still easy for me to keep all of that stuff discoverable by topic even though all of my writing happens in the daily note.

  • The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage by Clifford Stoll

    Great tool for scheduling meetings while protecting my calendar and making sure I still have lots of time for deep work during the week.

  • Dedicated: The Case for Commitment in an Age of Infinite Browsing by Pete Davis

    Great tool for scheduling meetings while protecting my calendar and making sure I still have lots of time for deep work during the week.

  • The Misbehavior of Markets: A Fractal View of Financial Turbulence by Benoit B. Mandelbrot

    Great tool for scheduling meetings while protecting my calendar and making sure I still have lots of time for deep work during the week.