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i’m great fan of Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson books. latest one - it doesn’t have to be crazy at work - is a great continuation of the previous pieces. all of them: rework, remote and getting real should be part of ‘must read’ for teams and their managers. the most important in what they write about is that they bring it to life. and they write about all of the important things - including team management and organization, the way they work, the ideas that guide them and the lack of ‘corporate bullshit stories’ typical workplaces and companies try to invent just to justify need to work harder. ...

Cixin Liu trilogy was excellent. I wrote about it before. the latest collection of stories by the same author… well. not so much anymore. i am sad to say that it’s almost like Abelard Giza said in one of his standups pieces - ‘first there’s this original idea, and then total shit’). from the whole series of stories in the volume ‘wandering earth’ you can find maybe two or three original and interesting ones. the others are an attempt to glue a new story using almost the same or even exactly the same ideas. ...

great book. short but perfect. i will not try to praise and underline my deep knowledge and uderstanding of - Nosowska works. i know her almost exclusively from ‘texan’, and by the way she writes about people like me in one of the chapters about psychotherapists. i did not even knew, that she has a feed on instagram, publishes video - and in general - as a private person. not to mention all of her works. ...

it took me a few hours to figure out the new subtleties. new computers from Apple with a built-in T2 chip (i.e. new iMac Pro and Macbook Pro 2018 edition) have a dedicated operating system protection. what’s the problem? first of all, by default, they can not be booted from an external medium. it’s part of the security that Apple introduced to make it more difficult for a potential hacker. to change this setting, you have to get to the system tools that live on a special ‘recovery’ partition. then it is simple: ...

i just realised, that there’s a port! you just need to install xhyve… and that’s it. you don’t need VMware or VirtualBox anymore. have a great virtualization!

great and unfortunately very short book about british geeks. it consists of couple of short chapters covering specific areas - from satellites (Ariel program), Blue Streak missiles, through Concorde (and all history of trying to keep it in service), to geeky pieces like legendary David Brabens Elite game. you won’t find too much about Elite game itself, as author is focusing more on the business side of things. however, there are couple of interesting pieces - like David relentless work on optimizing game code for BBC Micro (20kB of RAM!). game went on sale in september 1984 - i was six years old at the time, and in two years my father will buy ZX Spectrum 81. with shocking… 1kB of RAM! :) i only got to know Elite much later - in late 90’s in PC era. ...

I bought it, so you won’t have to. ‘blood, sweat and pixels’ is book of Jason Schreier - kotaku fame. and to set record straight - it’s very, very bad book. to further add to insult, one of the chapters is focused on our very own ‘witcher 3’. let me shorten your torment, and save 30 PLNs by summarizing the diagram that Jason uses to describe the process of creating each of the games: ...

another trilogy worth reading, rightly celebrating popularity as part of the (weak, and painfully crippled) Netflix screening. it consists of Altered Carbon, Broken Angels and Woken Furies. they all cover adventures of a single hero, however because of the “altered carbon” specifics, it’s almost like three different books. Takeshi Kovacs is single character, former Envoy, but given he’s constantly using different bodies, books are fast paced and interesting. ‘broken angels’ keeps ‘altered carbon’ tempo and adds some interesting twists, and ‘woken furies’ in my humble opinion is weakest of all three, but still written well and keeping the level overall. ...

all three books are great, and whole trilogy - delightful. they’re refreshing in style, and for me personally very similar to writings of Stanisława Lema (well, at least there where it’s close to intergalactic travels and technology) and Asimov. everything embedded into chinese cultural environment that i studied recently for professional reasons). some of that can be seen very clearly in long term (really long term) strategies mixed with tactical execution. ...

for the first time in a few years I took three weeks of vacation. …and this is starting to catch up with me :) i took few books with myself, but only some of them are worth mentioning - like ‘Hit refresh’ by Satya Nadella (though I have not read it yet) and ‘Now. The physics of time’ - I am in the process and it is fascinating to read. the remaining two positions will remain in the shadow of oblivion. ...