MESAVERSE

Books

Not everything I read so far but everything I decided to catalogue.

How the Internet Happened: From Netscape to the iPhone

Another great book about the history of the Internet. Breakdown across the decades of history, in which I really liked the history of Netscape, and the dot-com crisis. It is sometimes light on details, but it’s understandable. I recommend!

Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time

It’s remarkable how many problems people had 100 years ago that we don’t even know about now. I didn’t know that people could travel by sea “left/right” but going “up/down” was a pure guess game. Dangerous one as well. Solving the longitude troubles required another invention that we take for granted. A clock! One that could endure sea travel and all the issues that come with it. A history of a genius, but also a pride of his rivals that for years could agree that what he created was better than his ideas.

Where Wizards Stay Up Late

It is a fascinating book on the origins of networking, ARPANET, and protocols. Although quite dense with facts and names, it was a pleasant lecture aimed at a non-tech audience. Interesting to read how the RFC format was created (out of modesty), how the first protocols emerged, and how email was the flywheel for the network adoption. Recommend!

The Writing of the Gods: The Race to Decode the Rosetta Stone

Great history of deciphering the hieroglyphs. Reads like an adventures book, but describes very well the struggles and problems of Ancient Egypt’s written language.

The User's Journey: Storymapping Products That People Love

Main takeaway: use stories! This is a natural way we, humans, think. This book is short but I think it could be trimmed even more. Overall, introduces a very nice framework for product development.

The Soul of a New Machine

What a book! I was fascinated by the story of creating a new computer from scratch. Well written, and explains in an easy language quite complex concepts. Times changed definitely, I felt bad for engineers that they worked 80h weeks. But when you need to debug problems with an oscilloscope, write all the tooling by yourself, it takes time. Did past generations work more so that we could work less?