Required Reading

This is my list of the most significant writings with regard to my worldview, which is a mix of engineering and philosophy. "Writing" is defined loosely as any multimedia.

I present this list in the order you should consume them in. Do not interpret the order as a value judgement (= the most important articles are not necessarily first.)

I've bisected this list into two lists, the 'essential' list and the 'supplemental' list. I ask that you do not skip items from the essential list, but you may skip items from the supplemental list.

Table of Contents

1. Essential
2. Supplemental

Essential

1. Mastering Chaos - A Netflix Guide to Microservices
2. Steve Yegge's Google Platforms Rant
3. Intro to gRPC: A Modern Toolkit for Microservice Communication
4. Bootcamps vs. College
5. Make More Money, Be More Valued.
   1. Salary Negotiation with Josh Doody
6. Getting Rich: from Zero to Hero in One Blog Post
   1. Getting Started #1: What am I supposed to do with all this money?
7. Synecdoche, New York (Film Dir. Charlie Kaufman)
   1. The Absurdist Philosophy of Synecdoche, New York
8. The Fountain (Film Dir. Darren Aronofsky)
   1. The Philosophy of The Fountain
9. Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End (Book by Atul Gawande)
10. Nuts and Bolts of Applying Deep Learning (Andrew Ng)
11. How the Economic Machine Works by Ray Dalio
12. Homeless man talks openly about being addicted to heroin
13. I can't show you the most important video I've ever made by Taran Van Hemert
14. DEFCON 19: Steal Everything, Kill Everyone, Cause Total Financial Ruin! by Jayson E. Street
15. Ruby on Rails demo
16. Money as a System of Control by Andreas M. Antonopoulos
17. Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don't (Book by Jim Collins)
    1. Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies (Book by Jim Collins)
18. Johnathan Blow on Deep Work
19. The Friendship That Made Google Huge
20. Avoiding Fallback in Distributed Systems

Supplemental

1. Indexing 101: Optimizing MySQL queries on a single table
2. MySQL's EXPLAIN Demystified