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Short-form Insights
Greedy algorithms make locally optimal choices at each step. They work when the problem has optimal substructure and the greedy choice property—when choosing the best option now doesn't prevent you from finding the global optimum. Most of life doesn't work this way, which is why intuition fails us in complex systems.
You can't have Consistency, Availability, and Partition Tolerance all at once. Pick two. In distributed systems, as in relationships, you're always trading off between staying in sync, being present, and handling disconnection gracefully.
Sapir-Whorf for programmers: writing Haskell makes you think in types and transformations. Writing Python makes you reach for pragmatic solutions. The patterns you internalize become the lens through which you see problems.
Curated Notes
Abelson & Sussman
Still the best introduction to thinking computationally. Not about Lisp—about abstraction, recursion, and how to build complex systems from simple parts.
Martin Kleppmann
The modern bible for understanding distributed systems. Every chapter is a rabbit hole worth exploring. Read it twice.
Marcus Aurelius
A Roman emperor's private journal on dealing with chaos, uncertainty, and the gap between intention and action. Two thousand years later, still relevant.
Worked with
Books that shaped my thinking
Douglas Hofstadter
The book that made me understand recursion, self-reference, and why consciousness might emerge from strange loops.
Carlo Rovelli
Time doesn't flow. It's layered. Rovelli writes physics like poetry.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Some things benefit from disorder. Applies to systems, careers, and life strategies.
Jorge Luis Borges
Short stories as thought experiments. The Library of Babel changed how I think about infinity.
Currently
Reading: Designing Data-Intensive Applications
Last run: 5K this morning
Languages
Cat person