Never eat alone, or else….

Image by Silviu on the street from Pixabay

Never Eat Alone: Keith Tahl Ferrazzi Raz: 9780241004951: Amazon.com: Books

In academia, the motto is “publish or perish”, with the emphasis on publishing. It’s for a good reason – we, academics, scholars, researchers, exist in a complex network of dependencies. We need others to get inspiration, understanding and when we get stuck.

If you look at the nobel prize winners, most of them work together. Listening to them I get an impression that you cannot become great by sitting in your own room and hatching ideas. But, at the same time, we are often introverts, at least I am.

This book is a great example of how we can build our networks and make meaningful connections. It helped me to realize how to be good at meaningful networking, not the one where you focus on meeting as many people as possible or as important people as possible. No, it’s about how to meet all kinds of people and how to learn from them. It’s about how to identify even a single item of information that you can use in your own work and for your own benefit.

I recommend this as a reading for one of those dark, autumn evenings that are inevitable coming now….

Materials that shape the world (of computing)

Material World: A Substantial Story of Our Past and Future: Ed Conway: 9780753559178: Amazon.com: Books

As a software engineer, I take hardware for granted. Moore’s law has taught me that all kind of computing power grows. My experience has taught me that all computing power is then consumed by frameworks, clouds and eventually is not enough.

This great book shades a really interesting light on the way in which materials like Lithium and Silicon shape our society. We think that TSMC is one of the isolated companies that excelled in chip-making. The reality is that this company is great, but it is also only one in a long chain of suppliers of the chip industry. We learn that the sand which is used to make chips comes from the US, not from Taiwan. We learn that the lithium used in our batteries comes often from the Andes, Chile, not from China. We also learn that the ONLY way for the humanity to progress is to collaborate cross-nations. If we don’t do that, no single country in the world has the machinery, the know-how and the competence to develop our modern technology.

It is in a series of great readings for software engineers when they start their studies today.

How innovations spread…

The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution: Isaacson, Walter: 9781476708706: Amazon.com: Books

Although this book is a bit dated – in the sense when we call everything that is pre-pandemic as dated – it is a great reading. It takes us on a journey of inventions in Silicon Valley, although it starts with Ada Byron and her work on computing machines.

I recommend this book because it goes against established theories in academia about innovations – that we innovate individually or in teams. Instead, it takes us on the journey of connections, research and innovation building on one another. It tells a great story how world’s technology evolves by taking one innovation and making another one. It is a story of global collaborations and how these collaborations are entangled with one another and support one another.

If it was up to me, this would be a mandatory reading for all new students of the university software engineering programs.