HackerNews Readings: The Soul of A New Machine

All Time Past 6 Months

Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship

Robert C. Martin

4.7 on Amazon

43 HN comments

Designing Data-Intensive Applications: The Big Ideas Behind Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Systems

Martin Kleppmann

4.8 on Amazon

34 HN comments

The Pragmatic Programmer: 20th Anniversary Edition, 2nd Edition: Your Journey to Mastery

David Thomas, Andrew Hunt, et al.

4.8 on Amazon

27 HN comments

A Philosophy of Software Design

John Ousterhout

4.4 on Amazon

12 HN comments

Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture

David Kushner, Wil Wheaton, et al.

4.8 on Amazon

11 HN comments

The Unicorn Project

Gene Kim

4.6 on Amazon

8 HN comments

Game Programming Patterns

Robert Nystrom

4.8 on Amazon

8 HN comments

Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code (2nd Edition) (Addison-Wesley Signature Series (Fowler))

Martin Fowler

4.7 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

Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software

Charles Petzold

4.6 on Amazon

7 HN comments

The Soul of A New Machine

Tracy Kidder

4.6 on Amazon

7 HN comments

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

Nadia Eghbal

4.6 on Amazon

6 HN comments

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

Camille Fournier

4.6 on Amazon

6 HN comments

Cracking the Coding Interview: 189 Programming Questions and Solutions

Gayle Laakmann McDowell

4.7 on Amazon

6 HN comments

Clean Architecture: A Craftsman's Guide to Software Structure and Design (Robert C. Martin Series)

Robert Martin

4.7 on Amazon

5 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.)