January & February 2024 Books

January & February 2024 Books

Below is a list of the books I’ve read in January and February 2024 with a few comments on each of the books.

I’m proud of the diversity of technical and non-technical books so far - my favorite in this list has been Design of Everyday Things By Donald A. Norman , with a special mention of a book I read close to end of last year, Thinking in Systems by Donella H. Meadows.

• The Age of A.I and Our Human Future by Henry Kissinger, Eric Schmidt and Daniel Huttenlocher
  • It was an interesting read, but unfortunately I couldn’t get too hooked, there were lots of assumptions about the future and where they spoke about AI their target audience was probably folks totally unaware of the current advancements so I didn’t feel I gained much reading it.
• Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time by Jeff Sutherland
  • This is written by the creator of what we call now “Scrum”. I have mixed feeling about this book, although I’m a massive fan of most of the principles throughout the book, there is lots of ideology dump from the author in various places. So maybe a good summary is “Great principles, not so great stories”.
• Fundamentals of Software Architecture: An Engineering Approach by Mark Richards
  • Unfortunately I couldn’t get all the way through this book. There were many useful principles, especially in capturing requirements for software architecture. However, I struggled with all the terminology dump, it felt like there was lots of terminology purely for the sake of complexity. I get the need for the terminology to capture all the design considerations when designing a system but I simply got bored.
• Leading Change by John P.Kotter
  • This is a book that was written after John P.Kotter’s articles in HBR about change management got popular. I’ve been thinking a lot about change management at work and this book came at the right time! However, I do feel the book could have been a tenth of the size, maybe I should have just read his articles.
• Designing Machine Learning Systems by Chip Huyen
  • This was a phenomenal book, well written and taught me a ton I didn’t know about designing machine learning systems. I loved how Chip kept reminding the reader that Machine Learning in Academia and Production are fundamentally different and where all the differences are.
• Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman
  • As I write this I’m wrapping up this book but I can confidently say that it’s transforming how I think about product development. Gosh, I wish every engineer is required to read this, I could have used this book years ago. For an engineer, it gives you a glimpse into human centered design, and how to create the most value for users - something we all should be putting above everything else. Although this is a book about design, every role involved in product development could learn a ton from the principles Donald describes in this book.

Special Mention

I read Thinking in Systems by Donella H. Meadows late in December 2023 and I can’t help but add it to this list.

Thinking in Systems introduces the concept of System Thinking and how it can be used in various different contexts to understand existing systems and why they behave the way they do. I’ve since been applying systems thinking in software development and it’s a phenomenal way to build conceptual models about the systems I’m building. Also, I’ve randomly stumbled across this article: Nobody Ever Gets Credit for Fixing Problems that Never Happened. The article makes heavy use of systems thinking to model performance in organizations and the incentive structures involved for all parties (highly recommend reading the article!)