Valentin Jacquemin

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.

  1. Here’s the post: https://eli.thegreenplace.net/2025/summary-of-reading-october-december-2025/ ↩︎

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.

Pseudo-random maze generated by the 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.

  1. 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:

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

Hotel Pastis

I took that book off the shelve of our cosy Airbnb during our stay in Atascadero. Peter Mayle had this thing for making you want to get your next apero, taste good food, under the sun of Provence.

In that particular story, I thoroughly enjoyed Ernest and felt that the side plots were unecessary.

Healing the modern brain

Well paced and interesting. Our brain is fascinating. The author describes how it might thrives if we take good care of this wonderful machine of ours. Several tenets are part of the right mix, I could not mention all of them on top of my head but there are nature, purpose, sleep, a total of 9.

We see that people’s environments also play an important role in how they feel and how they interact with the world around them. The field of epigenetics, or the study of how our environments change how our genes are expressed,means that our DNA is not our health destiny. We have the power to make vital lifestyle changes that can quite literally change the way our bodies read genetic code, determining which genes are expressed and which are silenced.

With the right balance, our brain gets challenged and grows and all this contributes to a fullfilled life.