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Books life

Positive Intelligence

This year (thanks to my coach, Dani) I’ve been spending a lot of time on “PQ” aka “Positive Intelligence” aka “mental fitness”. I read the book, took the six week intensive program, and continue to practice it (almost) every day. What is it? the core premise is that there is the part of your brain […]

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Books

Book: Let’s Talk

Let’s Talk: Make Effective Feedback Your Superpower (Amazon) was so good – I read an interview with the author, ordered it immediately, read it soon after, and was already recommending it to people a few chapters in. It’s a book about feedback, which, cool, plenty of them, and plenty of conversations about feedback. The thing […]

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Books

Books about Therapy

Maybe You Should Talk to Someone (Amazon) was one of the most impactful books I read in 2019. It was extremely readable and super insightful. Reading this book fundamentally changed my approach to therapy, helped me accelerate my progress, and ultimately finish* (*at least for now) therapy. Therapy is such a personal thing and it’s […]

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Books

Book: Living by the Code

I’m in this book Living By the Code, talking about engineering management. Ray helpfully pulled out some of his highlights from my interview: 1) Keeping a team productiveI loved the section where you talked about orienting the entire team toward continuously delivering use value. It sounds so simple when you say it, but it’s so […]

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Books

Book: Managing Transitions

I’ve been thinking a lot about change management, lately – what makes it work, what makes it not. As a result, I was looking for reading that would help me formalize some of the concepts, to allow me to go one level deeper than recognizing what won’t work to more thoughtfully critique why certain things […]

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Books

Book: Good Strategy/Bad Strategy

I loved Good Strategy/Bad Strategy (Amazon) and learned so much from it. What really stood out to me was the depth required in defining strategy, and the way of thinking that takes that depth, and constructs a long term trajectory built on proximate objectives – the next steps that seem totally possible from where we […]

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Books

Book: Love Sick

I read Love Sick on the recommendation of my friend Natasha. I found it an interesting and at times helpful read, but whether or not it’s interesting probably depends on the person. It’s about the way people experience love, mostly as told by literature, illustrated with comparison to mental illness. It’s heteronormative, and not exactly balanced […]

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Books

Book: Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions

I bought Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions (Amazon) by accident trying to buy We Should All Be Feminists, but I have no regrets because I loved it, found myself reading it going yes yes yes and so what follows is not a review so much as a strong endorsement that you should really read it, […]

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Books

Book: So You Want to Talk About Race

I read So You Want to Talk About Race (Amazon) after seeing my friend Jill tweet about it. As a white European, whilst I care about intersectionality and try to educate myself, I know there’s a lot I don’t know, and going deeper on this topic seemed like a good next step after reading Whipping […]

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Books Programming

Book: Working Effectively with Legacy Code

Reading Working Effectively with Legacy Code (Amazon) made me really want to get into something and write some tests. It’s a really actionable book, and I liked how pragmatic it was – focusing on being able to create incremental progress, but balancing that with what you’re aiming towards. I think a sign of a foundational programming […]