The past year has been quite a busy one, but I managed to find some time for recreational reading / lecture watching here and there. Below are some of my favorite findings of the year.

Clifford Stoll - The Cuckoo’s Egg
Incredibly engaging, first-person account of hunting a hacker in the early days of networked computers. One of the things that makes it such an interesting read is that he describes the hunt’s impact on his personal and professional life while trying to do the right thing. There was also a more technical writeup / article published which you can find here.

Unix-Haters Handbook
This book was an extremely grumpy, technical and funny rant against C, the UNIX OS and it’s development environment. The book definitely challenged some of my assumptions and understandings of UNIX. It also gave a very interesting historical view presented by former PDP / Lisp Machine admins and developers who were slowly being swallowed up by the UNIX revolution in the 80s and 90s. Some of the described system components / design issues seem to still be with us, making it still relevant today. The book is hosted here by MIT.

Boring Technology Club
Philosophical manifesto concerning maturity in IT engineering.

“..how to be old, for young people.”

Robert “Uncle Bob” Martin
Famous from The Agile Manifesto and his book “Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship”, I discovered his presentations after a friend’s recommendation. I am finding these extremely engaging and inspiring while trying to mature as an IT engineer.

Jake Williams
His BlackHat presentation “Conducting a Successful False Flag Cyber Operation (Blame it on China) was fantastic.