reading

books

Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh

caught me by surprise. It's been recommended to me many times with the warning that it's quite heavy, so I was always apprehensive of picking it up. I needn't have been.

While dealing with the topics of drug abuse and other addictions, we develop relationships with some troubled characters. Some of them have redeeming moments, though they tend to be few and far between, which makes the book a gripping read despite the lack of plot. I'm told the film is also brilliant so I can't wait to check it out.

I think in Scottish now.

The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley

The Ministry of Time is a fun sci-fi romance that I enjoyed most for its depictions of loving friends. The anachronisms of its characters are playful and the story hangs together nicely.

Well it almost does. It's inevitable for there to be holes when time gets involved. I think the decision not to dwell on it too much was the right one.

You Deserve a Tech Union by Ethan Marcotte

This is an eye-opening read as a newcomer to the world of work. It's got me thinking about what I value and how I interact with my colleagues and bosses. I can thoroughly recommend taking on board what it has to say – you're worth it.

From a literary perspective, it's clearly written by and for computer nerds. My favourite element is the citations are printed out as short links that take you directly to the source. Very neat.

The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr and George Spafford

The Phoenix Project comes heavily recommended by my colleagues and is a fun, if preachy, look at what the tech sector can learn from manufacturing.

I gobbled this up in a day, finding that many of its mantras I agreed with easily. There's only so much I can take from this into the working world, as someone with negligible power, but attaching vague concepts to strong anecdotes was helpful to distill some ideas.

If you're neither into organisation nor IT then this is not the book for you. Otherwise, I recommend considering its ideas with care.

Julia by Sandra Newman

Julia is a wonderful retelling of George Orwell's 1984. It maintains the same plot and world, but adds a new layer of intrigue by approaching the events from a woman's perspective.

Most importantly, it gives the women of Airstrip One humanity that is so often lacking in the genre. They gain drive and humour that is overlooked in the original novel.

blogs

• Adam Silver writes about user experience design in web development and explains many useful tips that someone new to development, like my self, might otherwise not think of.
• Annie Mueller writes about life in a wonderful style that makes me love to live it.
• Alex Russell writes about browsers and standards and the effect of public opinion on the development output of large companies.
• Baldur Bjarnason covers the political side of technology in a compelling, human manner.
• Blake Watson writes all about his personal journey in technology, though my favourites from him are all about his concept of home-cooked apps.
• Brian Birtles presents a unique perspective as a former browser engineer. He shares insights into the people and design of the web platform that is very interesting as someone who builds off it.
• Chris Coyier is a household name as the co-founder of CodePen, but I most know him for his short, notes-style blog posts about everything from web development to scrabble.
• Dmitrii Kovanikov writes about things that are incomprehensible to me (functional programming) but simultaneously incredibly exciting (omg I want to use CCL so badly).
• Dave Rupert is big on web components (I believe he's working on Fluent at Microsoft in fact) but likes to mix things up with his Vibe Checks and pretty much whatever else comes to mind.
• Egor Kloos talks about modern CSS and the changing face of web development.
• Felix Waller is a super cool dude you should read his stuff it's so good I pinky promise.
• Chris Ferdinandi's daily tips are short and sweet explanations of why Chris believes JavaScript frameworks are generally bad news and how to use the grain of the web to your advantage.
• Heather Buchel has some excellent material on how to encourage people to embrace accessibility.
• Heydon Pickering is partway through the mammoth task of humourously explaining every HTML element. I gave up far earlier than he has.
• Jake Archibald has a great many interesting thoughts about slightly obscure web development topics, my favourite of which radicalised my against self-closing tags.
• Jake Lazaroff has some interesting posts about webapp architecture and is a big fan of web components.
• Vesa Piittinen shares excellent, slightly esoteric tips that I've made suprisingly frequent use of.

That just scratches the surface of all I'm reading, but it turns out going through my RSS reader person by person and having to distill their entire corpus into one or two sentences is hard actually. When I next have a free afternoon I'll continue the job, and maybe even slap an OPML file up somewhere to make your life easier ;)