The Power of Habit
When learning about our own behaviors meet entertainment, it hits a kind of soft spot that makes me like a book. Here it goes about our habits, what makes them habits, how to transform them, what makes a difference.
From nail bitting up to institutional habits.
The pace is dynamic and thanks to the different real life cases, it’s an entertaining journey. I felt sorry for this mum squandering money at Casino, but I felt crushed for that man who killed his wife while sleeping. He has been found not guilty by the court. These are two of the many accounts gathered in this book and all connected to how our brain relies on these three steps: 1. cue, 2. routine and 3. reward.
I got intrigued by the opening case of Eugene Pauly which leads the author to say:
The brain has this amazing ability to find happiness even when the memories of it are gone
Another fact that I liked was when stating the importance of writing down about goals and about expected challenges. It’s when the author takes hip surgery patients as example.
The patients who had written plans in their booklets had started walking almost twice as fast as the ones who had not.
It turns out that writing down goals and strategies to overcome specific challenges that can be anticipated gives better chances to succeed.
The patients plans were built around inflection points when they knew their plan–and thus the temptation to quit–would be strongest. The patients were telling themselves how they were going to make it over the hump.
Without habits our life would be unbearable. We may be thankful for this behavior to exist. Who would not wish for better habits though? This read reinforces the idea that it’s possible to transform habits and gives hints of strategies that optimize our chances to succeed in doing so.
The Making of Prince of Persia–Journals 1985-1993
I’ve never played Prince Of Persia myself but I remember a school mate having a good time during some of our labs in high school. That seemed retro back then already, that was the early 2000s.
Reading these journals, I’ve got to understand that this game has to be completed in 60 minutes, that picked my interest. I think I’ll give it a proper shot soon.
Anyways, this book is, as the title mentions, the journals of Jordan Mechner at the time when he developed and released POP to the world.
It’s raw, that feels unedited. But there’s no rules, that is a personal journal. Plus, as he explains, this book has no publisher or marketing team behind it.
Mechner states his motivation in the introduction, telling the response he got when publishing extracts of his journals to his personal website:
The old journals seem to resonate not only with game developers, but with writers, artists and creators of all stripes, some of whom weren’t born yet in 1985.
I enjoyed to read about the creative process, the struggles to deal as a team to make the game a success and how over time the whole excitement peaks to tremenduous results.
It’s hard to not be nostalgic, that seems fun being a game developer in the 80s.
I wished I could better understand how he got to translate video captures into game sprites while reading. But as it turns out, this kind information is available on his personal website. Have a shot at the ArsTechnica mini doc/interview he shares there to know more.
Unbroken Will
Leopold Engleitner is one of the many who proved himself stronger than the autoritarian nazi regime. That fascinates me, that strength, that resolve.
The author shares his own impression at the outset of this book:
What I have found so impressive is the outstanding simplicity and uprightness of Leopold Engleitner’s life; he succeeded in maintaining his personal integrity and his faith under the most adverse conditions imaginable. It is phenomenal that a huge, totalitarian system failed to break the will of such an unassuming man. Twentieth-century history would surely have been written differently if more of his contemporaries had acted as courageously as Leopold Engleitner.
Each documented interaction between Leopold and the authorities never fails to
show how respectful he remained when explaining his stand. He would never
compromise but did so with a mild temper and deep respect
:
Engleitner was perfectly happy to accept work that the Nazis found for him but refused to support Hitler. Engleitner answered: “I’m grateful for all that governmental institutions do for citizens. In fact, I don’t smoke or drink and am therefore not a burden on the national health service.” “Well, that’s very commendable,” said the man, “but you must also defend the Fatherland!” “There’s no fatherland for me to defend,” Engleitner replied, “because all men are brothers. I take God as my guide, and he knows no borders. If you want to make war, I’m not going to stop you, but I won’t join in!”
Leopold and his fellows were shown remarkable trust during there time in the camps.
The SS displayed great trust in the Bible Students. They were among the few detainees assigned to shave the SS men because they could be trusted with razors.
Such an example of integrity is precious to me, I deeply hope to be able to display the same kind of courage and will. As Leopold says in the book this kind of strength is not only a matter of personal disposition, this comes from something greater. One has to trust and fully rely on that power to successfully face opposition. Of any kind. That account is an additional proof that this is possible. Leopold lived 107 years.
CSS for JavaScript Developers
I’ve more than 800 lines of personal notes as I completed this fantastic course. Very comprehensive and so useful for an oldie like me. Heck, the table layout is something I’ve used myself:
In the old days, table layouts were used for just about everything. Nowadays, Flexbox and Grid are better solutions in most situations. We won’t be covering table layouts in this course.
Ouch… When I first learned to build websites, I had
frameset
elements in my markup, that gives you a bit of an idea what kind of old I am.
No worries though, I’ve not been stuck to that old days, in the meantime I’ve
enjoyed following the new features in CSS. But for example, Flexbox and Grid
were 2 layouts that I did not take the time to study seriously. I think
initially when I did find out that Josh would publish such a course, that was
my main incentive, to get up to date on those new additions to the CSS world.
The content of this course is split into 10 modules, each one is filled with videos, interactive explanations and exercises. At the end of each module, a workshop helps to internalize all the concepts tackled within that particular module. I plan to redo all of them now that I’ve finished the course.
I particularly appreciated the solution videos of the workshops. Josh is very good at sharing how he would do particular things, what he pays attention to, even how he would approach designers around specific challenges. All this return of experience is extremly valuable. On top of that, I just find it enjoyable to follow, he has a nice way to communicate.
If you are used to his blog posts, you might have notice how Josh gives a particular attention to the details. For example, here’s an extract of his latest post, Sneaky Header Blocker Trick:
This is a fairly subtle thing, and I suspect most readers have never even noticed it. But there’s something about it which just feels so satisfying to me. It’s one of my favourite little bits of polish on this blog.
Just feels so satisfying to me
. Yes, you can feel that he just enjoys what
he’s doing and that he wants to produce something of quality. You have to
appreciate that as it’s definitely not a given these days. That is present in
this course too, it’s comprehensive yet approachable. The content is thorough
but split in nicely sized chunks.
I leveled up my CSS skills, if you are coming from a Javascript developer perspective and you are eager to improve yours, this course will be a joy to complete. Go get it, it’s available under https://courses.joshwcomeau.com/css-for-js.
Source Code Meine Anfänge
Bill Gates gives away at the very end that this would be the first book of a trilogy. Not sure yet, if I’ll read the 2 others.
It might be because I’ve read it in German, was something lost in translation? I could not be really taken by the writing style.
Anyways, I still enjoy being brought back to that time when computing was less mainstream, more hobby like. The exploration, the excitement, I might just get old but I feel like it was more present then. Well, some might wonder if it’s still a hobby when your read from this book. They enforced a grueling schedule on themselves to make Basic work on the Altair machine, Bill Gates relates that famous time when he would basically sleep at his terminal. By the way, that is mentioned in Deep Work too as an example of focus work.
Was nice to see that Bill Gates was a keen hiker, and that during his time in nature he would think about how to improve his code. That’s how it is with software, you keep twisting your mind to reach a goal, staying within the constraints of the machine at hand. He would do that often on paper as he had not permanent access to a terminal, other times I tell you. For some reasons, I romanticise those time. I’m sure my fond memories of using MS-DOS to boot up my copy of The Settlers has something to do with that, is that nostalgia?
Mit einem blauen Kugelschreiber unterstrich ich den wichtigsten Absatz: "Die Heimcomputerbranche wirkt zunehmend wie eine Miniaturversion der Mainframeindustrie – bei beiden beherrscht ein Anbieter den Markt."
Definitely interesting, simply wished for a more engaging writing style. But that’s personal taste I believe.
Breaking Through–My Life in Science
What a fantastic read.
I must confess, I did not know about Katalin Karikó before reading this book. I actually acquired that book based on a blog1 I follow.
She made the news though, big time! 2023 Nobel co-winner and holder of many honorary degrees, featured on many world renowned media outlets, she contributed so much in us having access to an effective COVID-19 vaccine.
When you read this book however, it’s less the breakthroughs that stand out and
more the perseverance, the unsatiable curiosity, that desire to learn, to
understand, to discover the laws of life. Her life is an ode to scientifiy
discoveries. We stand on the shoulders of giants
as she says.
Scientific inquiry is a puzzle that never stops changing. Each new piece snaps into place changes the puzzle itself opening entire new realms into which the puzzle grows… we stand on the shoulders of giants.
And yet, her life is a testimonial that this is not reserved to a specific breed or class of people. She admits eagerly that her health and her abilities were not obviously leading her to such a path. As a child, she missed many school days because of her poor health. And when she was at school, she quickly realized that she did not have the same abilities as others. Whereas others would be spoiled with a snapshot memory, she had to put in the work. But she learned that what she lacked in ability, she could make up in effort, working harder, with greater care, more hours. As she says, the brain is malleable, so she practiced studying, deliberately. School then became more natural. She never stopped practicing.
It’s about science but more than that, it’s about an intrepid human, whose curiosity is never satisfied. From growing up in the then comunist Hungary, we follow her until her breakthrough, the discovery along with Drew Weissman about how to engineer mRNA so that it can be used to produce desired proteins after being introduced into mammalian cells. In-between, well there’s life, many stories, how she met her lifelong love, left Hungary as a family with a toddler daughter, got supported, faced what seems to be unfair systems, grief, births.
She mentions a book that made a great impact. In the Stress of Life. A book she loved from high school that taught her to not blame, focus on what you can controland transform bad stress into good stress. I’m curious if this book is still available and relevant?
I learned, at least one, new word with this book: schmoozing.
What I liked really much was that I listened to this book. That’s first time I buy a book on Libro.fm. The narrator, Eva Magyar, made my experience a great time. Lovely accent, I sped up the pace just a tad bit, the iOS app user interface is top notch too, just loved it.
Writing for Developers
A title like “Writing for Developers” catches easily my attention. For a matter of fact, I enjoy writing and despite English not being my mother tongue, I still like to put my thoughts into written words, often in English.
I was hoping that this book would help me to become a better writer. It offers plenty pointers, like all the links to blog post examples, but I finished reading with a taste of misalignment. It’s no goal of mine to be successful in the book’s terms, i.e. hitting the first page of Hacker News or any other catchy outlet.
As much as I enjoy writing, I know there’s much room for improvement in the quality of my writing. The book touches on how to get orginazed in outlining a blog post, traps to avoid but what I keep in the end as most precious is the list of links shared as examples, they are all available in the accompanying GitHub repository.
The book helps to group blog posts into different categories and for each one it gives examples. I’m sure that to get better at writing, you need to read quite a bit so this list on its own is a worthy start.
A few tips I’d like to keep in mind: bold the prepositions in an attempt to see what could be dropped, highlight the “to be” verbs again to refactor towards a more effective wording (same tip for the word “very”), be affirmative it’s easier for the brain, stay consistent in verb tense and how the reader is addressed, read a draft out loud to spot problems.
The afterwords calls for more blogs, Tweet less. Blogs are owned by
you… Share because you want to help, but also because you want to help
yourself.
That’s actually my ultimate goal in keeping my blog, simply
to track and document for my own sake. I want to read back what I wrote and
enjoy it. Because I see I progressed, because it makes me remember how I felt.
10 Print
This book has been instrumental to revive my drive to program for the fun of it. However, not aimlessly. For fun but consciously knowing that it’s a way to teach yourself. To learn. To grow.
Simply reading about that machine, the Commodore 64, brought me back to childhood and spurred renewed enthusiasm in me. We had a C64 in our living room. I was a 5 years old boy when we were playing Arkanoid on our minuscule monitor. How I cherish those memories. My first interactions with a computer. No programming yet, but fun was definitely there.
It is all about a 10 Print1 line of code that generates a pseudo-random succession of ‘\’ and ‘/’ which over time renders a maze-like illustration. Provided in the C64 manual, this has no other goal than to get a piece of art on screen. A recreational experience.
10 Print line of code.But it goes well beyond than just that one line of code. It’s about computing history, randomness, underground culture, and more.
Just a couple of highlights.
In 1959, one of the earliest computer programs written for fun–-an example of “recreational computing”-–depicted an experimenter’s maze.
About history intersecting with graphics programming.
Ken Perlin, one of the programmers for the graphics in Tron, expressed frustration with the clean look. Later, in 1983, he developed a technique called Perlin Noise to generate organic textures that have a random appearance event though they are fully controllable to allow for careful design.
The early times of programming languages design, and always with references to books and actors of that computing history. Sounds like an endless well to explore.
These concise little programs were written at least as early as the beginning of the 1960s. The language that was most famous for writing such programs was APL, designed by Kenneth Iverson using special (non-ASCII) notation. APL was first described in his 1957 book A Programming Language and was first implemented at IBM beginning in 1960.
It’s of course not only mentionning APL, the very title of this book is a BASIC line of code. We navigate in the history of efforts to make portable programming languages:
BASIC continued the evolution of high-level languages, building on some of what FORTRAN, Algol and other languages had accomplished: greater portability across platforms along with keywords and syntax that facilitated understanding the language and writing programs.
Back to the fun part. That’s a point developed all over this book. One that is not new. Another work referenced from the book:
In his 1972 book Man and the Computer, Kemeny defends programming and playing games and other “recreational” uses of the computer as important.
Another form of fun was how that thing, the C64, has been advertised in some places:
A Commodore 64 advertisement that was aired in Australia in 1985 provides evidence that BASIC was a central selling point. After the television spot showed bikini-clad women descending a waterslide and cut to a woman happily using a Commodore 64 in a retail store, it cut once again to a screenful of BASIC, and then to depict a boy programming in BASIC. The commercial suggests that computer programming was an obvious, important, and fun use of a home computer.
I found the ad on youtube:
The book is availabe in PDF format under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 license. All information available under https://10print.org/ (as well as a bunch of links to dig deeper, watch out for the rabbit hole!). That’s the version I’ve read but I would love to get a physical copy.
I most enjoyed this book.
-
in its entirety:
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10↩︎
Konzentriert Arbeiten
Deep work versus shallow work who are you rooting for? I find it disturbing, how difficult it is to convince people for the need of deep work. This book gives some clues, like for example how our brain gets simply addicted to those little treats. Checking social media, checking emails. Emails is a probable culprit. It might give the impression one is productive, woaw I reached inbox-zero look at that! On the other hand, processing those might have produced only little value. But we for some reason praise short response time and 24/7 availability. The lobby for open space offices is touched on too.
That’s refreshing to read an author who basically tells us that this and deep work is incompatible. If one’s goal is to go deeper, he’s gonna have to make sacrifices for example on social media and/or email.
A few take-away points for me:
- it boils down to basically plan every minute, that does not sound sexy but I get the point. I think it helps to stick to an activity that you knew in advance would make sense to complete. That should help to not give in to external or internal impulses for interruption.
- the capacity to concentrate can be trained (that connects very well with the concept presented in another book I read some time ago, Mindset).
- that goes hand-in-hand with another point, deliberately recognize that our brain might be addicted to interruptions, and thus the need to actively untrain that.
- a study around the myth of multitasking is mentioned, from Clifford Nass, I assume it’s this one on NPR: The Myth Of Multitasking. I’ll listen to it later.
- yet another time I stumble on the mention of Carl Jung over a short time, I’ve read a few quotes of him recently. In this book, the focus is on how he brought deep work in his busy schedule. He owned his own silence tower (located in Bollingen, St-Gallen). When he’d get there, he’d be the only one having the keys, impossible to be disrupted.
auf den folgenden Seiten werde ich Sie davon zu überzeugen versuchen, mich bei der Errichtung unserer eigenen Bollinger Türme zu begleiten… Ein Leben mit Tiefgang ist ein gutes Leben.
I read this one in German, as Nicole gave it to me after she first read it. Wouter focused more on the idea about getting used to boredom, a nice point too!
"Kümmert Sie, was andere Leute denken?" Neue Abenteuer eines neugierigen Physikers.
A book in 2 parts, around the life of the author first, recounted by the nobel prize Richard P. Feynmann himself. Second, his own recollection of the Rogers Commission, which revealed internal issues at NASA leading to the tragic accident of the Space Shuttle Challenger.
I’ve had a great time reading this one. It’s nice to read from such an highly educated person who keeps taking things with humor and don’t expect to be taken too seriously. Like in the “Hotel City” chapter for example, Feynmann is in Geneva walking around and randomly stumbling upon the United Nations premises. During a guided tour that he joined spontaneously, he sees from afar a known face, namely the russian physicist Igor Tamm. In his enthusiasm he crosses the door that separate them triggering the concern from the guide of his group who shouts “No, no! Not in there!” By then, no one from the group would have known that this man was a renown scientist.
His faithfulness commands respect too. He got married to his first wife Arlene, even though some time before their marriage she contracted tuberculosis. The illness did not question their commitment. I value this kind of attitude.
I honestly purchased this book for the second part, but in the end I think its for the first part that I’ll remember it.
wie wir später herausfanden, waren bei keinem der vorangegangenen Flüge jemals Rauchwolken aufgetreten