I read, write, listen and watch everything that interests me and I can get my hands on. The list is inexhaustible and evolves almost monthly with new ideas, hobbies and so on. I am naturally curios, I love (cannot emphasise the love of the craft enough) learning new things, understanding the process, applying the process and reaping the fruits of knowledge. From when I can remember I like to know things from little to small and I am intrigued by the inner working of all things.
Computers and specifically systems lend themselves well for people of my curiosity: we can quite easily decompose, put back together, create new systems and generally play around to get a deeper understanding of how they work. its probably no wonder that I ended up here, running an IT business, focused specifically on "systems". Hence my list begins with some really cool IT and systems related podcasts and newsletters:
On the metal is brought to you by a really unique company, oxide.computer. They talk about their experience building a new computer and everything in between. Although I am not as "low level" as these guys, listening to them has helped my understanding of some of these lower level systems. Besides being highly interesting it is also entertaining.
Triton Office Hours is brought to you by our partner MNX, the makers and builders of Triton Datacenter, which just so happens to be the technology powering our managed public cloud. Every two weeks we meet to discuss the roadmap, new ideas and concepts and together work towards a continuously better product.
monitoring.love is a weekly newsletter about IT monitoring and observability. They do a good job of aggregating really interesting articles with anything and everything related to monitoring and observability. I've found a lot of value here for our own monitoring ideas such as what does a "good" dashboard look like, how do you efficiently monitor a specific application or system and so much more.
dev.37signals.com is an awesome blog from the people behind basecamp.com and hey.com. I've looked up to the owners/founders of the company for the past 15 years and I am consistenly impressed with their pragmatic approach to everything! I highly recommend keeping an eye on 37signals, they speak their minds even when the rest of the world is busy following the newest trend. They are "my kind of people" and the recent talks about cloud spend resonate very clearly with me and our business strategy.
I am also slowly but surely reading the following three books:
Built to Last : Successful Habits of Visionary Companies is a really good book. Im only about 12% trough but I can already see it is by people that think and feel similarly to myself. I was never a part of the "boom" era where things happen quickly and at scale, Im in it for the long run, building things and relationships that last. Loving it so far, I expect to get a lot of insight from some of the largest companies around and some of coolest entrepreneurs.
It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work is another really good book. I've got a few more pages but Ill wrap this one up over the weekend. This is from the people t 37signals, so you know it's filled with pragmatic real world examples and ideas. Besides some of the cultural differences I believe exist between Europeans (specifically Eastern Europeans) and Americans, this book has already shaped the way I manage.
The Tools is an interesting read. I must admit I was intrigued by Jonah Hills Stutz documentary about his therapist. I ordered the book because I find these scenarios interesting and indeed, it may be what some people need.
Lastly, I am an ACM member and really enjoy the weekly articles, discussions and more that membership provides. With all the buzz around AI, I am now digging deeper and deeper into AI, LLM's and how they can benefit not just within the context of our daily operations within Spearhead but also within our personal lives. Im sure Ill have more on this as I explore.
I hope you get a chance to take a look at some of the sources above, they are a delight for me and I hope they can do the same for you.