HackerNews Readings: The Soul of A New Machine

All Time Past 6 Months

The Forever War

Joe Haldeman, George Wilson, et al.

4.4 on Amazon

7 HN comments

The Soul of A New Machine

Tracy Kidder

4.6 on Amazon

7 HN comments

Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software

Charles Petzold

4.6 on Amazon

7 HN comments

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: 50th Anniversary Edition

Thomas S. Kuhn

4.5 on Amazon

7 HN comments

Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World

Cal Newport

4.6 on Amazon

7 HN comments

Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones

James Clear and Penguin Audio

4.8 on Amazon

7 HN comments

Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces

Remzi H Arpaci-Dusseau and Andrea C Arpaci-Dusseau

4.7 on Amazon

7 HN comments

Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software

Erich Gamma , Richard Helm , et al.

4.7 on Amazon

7 HN comments

The Origin of Species: 150th Anniversary Edition

Charles Darwin and Julian Huxley

4.6 on Amazon

7 HN comments

The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change

Camille Fournier

4.6 on Amazon

6 HN comments

Open: An Autobiography

Andre Agassi, Erik Davies, et al.

4.7 on Amazon

6 HN comments

Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In

Roger Fisher , William L. Ury, et al.

4.6 on Amazon

6 HN comments

Lonesome Dove: A Novel

Larry McMurtry

4.8 on Amazon

6 HN comments

How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

Bill Gates

4.5 on Amazon

6 HN comments

Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software

Nadia Eghbal

4.6 on Amazon

6 HN comments

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kristopolousonMay 28, 2021

The book is pretty great. I'll put it with "The soul of a new machine", Ferguson's "Computer Wars" and Lapsley's "Exploding the phone" as top narrative tech books.

khendrononApr 18, 2021

Interesting write up. The whole article, with its stressed out overtime, inter-team fighting, and testing the computer using a game reminded me of "The Soul of a New Machine", which is a great read for anybody who hasn't read it.

jlconJune 18, 2021

Off the top of my head:

The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again by D.F. Wallace

Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov

Anything by John McPhee

Edit: formatting

samatmanonMay 19, 2021

Just as a random tangent from a great story, the Data General Eclipse was the machine designed and built in Tracy Kidder's excellent book The Soul of a New Machine.

Really fantastic book for anyone interested in the history of computers, captures its moment in time perfectly and won a Pulitzer for it. If you liked Halt and Catch Fire you'll love it.

ArnoVWonApr 18, 2021

Excellent read, but not only for the bonus part. If anyone else enjoyed it for the EE / computer engineering part, I recomment The Soul of a New Machine, by Tracy Kidder.

He followed, in a sort of embedded way, a team of Data General computer engineers in the late 70's, as they went through a death march to produce a 32-bit micro. Sort of like this blog post, but the book got a pullitzer.

http://www.ancientgeek.org.uk/ed/The_Soul_of_a_New_Machine.p...

ghaffonJuly 9, 2021

The Soul of a New Machine is still one of the best books about product development ever written. (Showstopper about Windows NT is very good too,)

I was a longtime hardware product manager at DG starting a few years after the events of "the book" as it was called. I knew a lot of the people involved and even dotted-lined into Tom West for a while when the first x86-based NUMA servers were rolling out.

ghaffonMay 4, 2021

I joined DG a few years later than that though I knew many people in "the book" including Tom West who I sort of dotted line reported to for a time when NUMA servers were coming out. (For those who don't know what we're talking about, "Soul of a New Machine" is still one of the best books about product development ever written.)