Month: December 2013

The Books Behind Me During the A* Interviews

George LondonLeave a comment

Since I was asked on Twitter. It should be noted that that shelf is where I keep my queue of books I have purchased but not yet read.

Pro Django – Alchin

Ready Player One – Ernest Cline

Cracking the Coding Interview – Laakmann, McDowell

From Counterculture to Cyberculture – Fred Turner

About Face 3, Essentials of Interaction Design – Cooper

Four Hour Body – Tim Ferris

The Paelo Manifesto – John Durant

Permutation City – Greg Egan

Antifragile – Nassim Taleb

The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Vol 1 – Richard Feynman

Surfaces and Essenceses – Hofsteadter

The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms – Cassirer

The Elements of Typographic Style – Bringhurst

Universal Principles of Design – Lidwell

A Tale of Two Cities – Dickens

The Success Equation – Maubousin

In the Heart of the Sea – Philbrick

Masters of Doom – Kushner

Coders at Work – Seibel

Customers Included – Hurst and Terry

Godel, Escher, Bach – Hofstadter

Futility – Gerhardie

The Frogs -Aristophanes

Den of Thieves – Stewart

Modernism – Peter Gay

Dithyrambs of Dionysus – Nietzsche

The Last Tycoon – Fitzgerald

Essays in Experimental Logic – Dewey

The Magic Mountain -Mann

Speech and Language Processing – Jurafsky, Martin

Database Management Systems – Gehrke

Semantic Web for the Working ontologist – Allemang, Hendler

The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Business Law – Danchy

Much obliged to any commenter who’d like to provide the Amazon links.

George LondonLeave a comment

A* Interview #12: RavenDB creator Ayende Rahein

Ed Note: Ayende is understandably very enthusiastic about RavenDB. So his first answer about it is very technical and rather long. If you’d like to skip to the rest of the easier-to-understand questions, start watching at 34:50

My top two lesson from Ayende:

1) It’s a lot easier to push yourself to improve if you care enough about what you’re working on to wake up for it at 4am.

2) It’s a big mistake to not admit you have a problem. Acknowledging badness is the first step to getting better.

Read about Ayende’s current favorite singer, Lily Allen

Read Ayende’s favorite recent book, Spellmonger by Terry Mancour

Check out Ayende’s blog

Use RavenDB.

Ayende recommends you go read the lmdb codebase!

Read the story of the A# Interviews here. For future interviews, subscribe to my newsletter or follow me on Twitter.

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George LondonLeave a comment

A* Interview #11: Jon Skeet, All-Time Highest Reputation StackOverflow User

My top two lessons from Jon:

1) Most mistakes come from users not understanding their data

2) Great communication comes from a whole lot of practice, and it really pays off in your career

Some links:

Watch Jon’s screen casts

Read Jon’s blog

Read some reasons why Jon Skeet is the Chuck Norris of coding

Follow Jon on Twitter

And finally, go buy “C# in Depth”!

Read the story of the A# Interviews here. For future interviews, subscribe to my newsletter or follow me on Twitter.

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George LondonLeave a comment

A* Interview #10: Ning Liang, Co-Founder of YC-backed RentMetrics and co-creator of HealthSherpa.com

Check out HealthSherpa

Follow him on Twitter here.

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