Book Review

Your story, well told by Corey Rosen¹

It was a fairly easy read and I finished it in about an hour. The goal of the book is to teach you how to tell a ‘personal story’ in a genre most closely associated with the The Moth. Overall I recommend the book - especially if you struggle to find “interestingness’ in your life or if you have something that happened to you that you wish to share with others. It includes specific techniques and worksheets to help you ideate and then structure your story. It pulls techniques from the field of writing, improv, and acting and teaches them in a very practical and straightforward way.

In Seeing Like A State ¹ the author discusses how the state necessarily “makes legible” its people and resources — and in doing so necessarily loses information. The author in particular focuses on what is termed " high modernism" which is defined as the ability to design and operate the state. the book then becomes primarily around failed state planning. These are some thoughts I have about the content. It isn’t a summary but more of some weakly held thoughts.

“The Annotated Turing” by Charles Petzold ¹

Many of us have learned about ‘Turing Machines’ or ‘Turing Completeness’ but have never actually read the motivating text and explanation. This is a phenomenal book that goes through paragraph by paragraph the paper “On Computable Numbers” ² by Alan Turing in a rigorous way explaining the concept intuitively and completely. Not only does it explain the text, but it also gives enough background so that one could understand and follow through the proofs themselves. It is well written and clear without feeling like a textbook. It is divided into fours sections:

I recently read “The leprechauns of software engineering” by Laurent Bossavit ¹. The book goes through a few myths about software engineering and then traces how those myths entered the public consciousness. It was well worth reading for anyone interested in research based software engineering practices. It was primarily useful on how to verify about claims rather than the claims themselves. While I’ve heard of most of the myths - I also heard about them as myths rather than as true claims. It reminded me a lot of “Making Software” ². Core Insights: