The week I started at Google in 2006, someone was doling out free books to the impressively large cohort of Nooglers. Among the books was Scott Meyer’s Effective C++. My day-to-day job did not yet involve writing C++ but on the 5 hour flight back to Atlanta, I started reading the book. I probably gained a deeper understanding of C++ in those five hours than in the years of dabbling I had done prior. Meyer’s pedantic, detail obsessed style coupled with the enumerated format was both effective and strangely entertaining. I’ve continued to have a soft-spot for the Meyer’s style in engineering books ever since. The number of authors who have replicated his style also suggests I was not alone in my admiration.

I guess you could argue that what I was looking for in this book was a little nostalgia to a time when my career was still building and to rekindle a little of the feeling of emerging mastery that the original book had given me. I have also not been keeping up with the evolutions of C++ and I was a bit uncomfortable losing my bearings in a language that took considerable effort to learn in the first place. I’m not sure it was time well spent in practical terms. I’m skeptical I will do much C++ in the coming years. It was fairly enjoyable, though, to revisit the Meyer’s style. The Modern C++ take isn’t quite as effective as his original. His struggle to break it down into concise items really does reflected the complicated mess that is modern C++. The additions to the language are important and useful but C++ is an enormous beast at this point with intractable cross-product of features. I continue to marvel at Meyer’s deep understanding of the language and the standards. This kind of depth seems increasingly rare in tech publishing these days. I enjoyed a little C++ nostalgia, I got a taste of the major changes in modern C++ and, then, I bailed out of the book early to make way for another book.

Like most highly online people who make it a point to avoid pledging allegiance to either political tribe, I bought this book the moment Martinez was ousted from Apple. My motivations were practical; I hoped to get a glimpse into what sexism looks like to some 2,000 Apple employees. The moral codes in tech have been shifting so rapidly in the last five years that even the most devout cannot be confident to avoid damnation. Even as I began reading this book, the accusations against Martinez grew in severity from misogynist to misogynist AND racist. I fully expect the charges to continue to accumulate as this story lingers in the media. The criticisms that Martinez received aren’t totally unwarranted. Chaos Monkeys is a crass, gonzo-style recounting of bros in tech and finance. It’s hard to tell how much of it is sincere and how much is exaggerated for good story-telling (and it very much is good story-telling). I can certainly see why some would find the culture he describes as off-putting. I’m a little puzzled and alarmed, though, that this makes a person totally unemployable at a large tech company.

What is also alarming for me personally is that I probably would not have enjoyed the book so much if not for the crass nature of Martinez’s retelling. The book is well-written, witty and self-deprecating. I don’t know if all 2,000 Apple critics stopped reading before the final pages, but Martinez doesn’t bellow triumphantly at the end and he is very much critical of his own self-centered nature throughout. The book was probably the most entertaining book I’ve read in a year and it certainly deserved the best seller status it received ... before its condemnation.

This book was written by a co-worker. I had not intended to read the book as Packt Publishing is known for low quality publishing. When talk began of doing a reading club that would cover the book, I decided that I should probably take a look. I made it about a third of the way through when I decided I had wasted enough of my time and money. This is a bad book. It ranges from inaccurate to nonsensical.

I felt compelled to read this book after several leaders at Mailchimp spoke highly of it. This book demonstrates that awful books can be based on and present very reasonable ideas. Many of the principles that Hastings presents as unique to the Netflix culture were popular in the 2000’s and seem to have fallen out of favor in recent years along with the reputations of many of the companies that espoused them. In short, this book compels organizations to hire the very best and minimize process intended to avoid risk. In my experience, hiring the very best people obviates the need for a lot of other bullshit that reliably accumulates in a growing company. So in many ways, I was already bought into the arguments this book makes before I opened the first page and I’ve been bought into them for almost two decades at this point.

While I don’t disagree with Hastings on many of his core culture philosophies, he doesn’t come across well in this book. His obsession with candid (sometimes inhuman) feedback makes him seem robotic and disconnected from his employees. Many of this policies have easily predictable tradeoffs but he seems oblivious to them. When they do come up, he is quick to produce a rationalization. In the last chapter, he even starts to walk back the idea that the company is a team not a family because it didn’t play well in some international offices where there is a greater emphasis on relationships over tasks. I have no doubt that Netflix has built a solid corporate culture. It’s obviously a successful company. However, I would be willing to wager that Hasting’s view of the culture is detached from reality. There are likely reasonable and very human influencers within the culture that are translating his principles as aspirations into something more practical. Otherwise, Rumors of Netflix’s culture of fear would be even more pronounced.

As I prepared for a road trip, I was combing through Amazon in search of a suitable audio book to help make the most of the time spent driving. While I had a few candidates, they were all of the popular political genre and I was pretty burned out on contemporary hot takes and tribal outrage. The day before, I had read Jonah Goldberg’s The Running With Scissors Party edition of his G-File column. In it, he had paid a nice tribute to Calvin Coolidge:

I like the stupidity of Calvin Coolidge, who said, "When you see 10 troubles rolling down the road, if you don't do anything, nine of them will roll into the ditch before they get to you."

The reference to stupidity in that quote, if you cannot tell, is sarcasm inspired by both current events and John Stuart Mill allegedly calling conservatives, “the stupid party.” While the mention of Coolidge was brief, the image of a calm, responsible executive was intriguing. It was also not the first time I had heard Coolidge offered up for praise in the small government circles. So I picked up the only Coolidge biography that also had an audio narrative option. I seriously doubt this is the best available biography but, at the time, it was the best one that fit my needs.

Coolidge is, indeed, worth general reconsideration as a president. Wilson and FDR draw so much attention from the era with their ambitious restructuring of the federal government. If, however, you are among the group who believes that overzealous expansion of the federal government was a grave mistake, then you’ll love this quiet witty man who was cautious in his spending and who felt it was his duty to “stay in his lane.” It is now puzzling to me why we don’t hear more about Coolidge if for no other reason than to serve as a contrast to the Wilson and FDR agendas.

Perhaps the best summary of Coolidge was provided, unsurprisingly, by Mencken after his death:

We suffer most when the White House bursts with ideas. With a World Saver [Wilson] preceding him (I count out Harding as a mere hallucination) and a Wonder Boy [Hoover] following him he begins to seem, in retrospect, an extremely comfortable and even praiseworthy citizen. His failings are forgotten; the country remembers only the grateful fact that he left it alone. Well, there are worse epitaphs for a statesman. If the day ever comes when Jeffersons’ warnings are headed at last, and we reduce government to its simplest terms, it may very well happen that Cal’s bones now resting inconspicuously in the Vermont granite will come to be revered as those of a man who really did the nation some service.

It took me far too long to complete this book. The reading was often tedious and, exhausted from the year long pandemic, I was often not sufficiently motivated to face the tedium. It was a good book, though, and thorough. It sent me down delightful rabbit holes. For instance, I implemented a b-tree for the first time in my career. I took copious notes and felt I could have dwelled on each chapter for months. The book was much like Kleppman’s Data-Intensive Applications book, but with deeper treatments of the topics and no closing sermon to wade through. While I’ll probably continue to recommend Kleppman’s book because it is easier to read, this book I believe is ultimately more rewarding due to the deeper coverage. I am glad I continued the slog through this book.