This is the first post of a series. Think usesthis.com, but for books. I hoard recommendations: whenever I get to know someone, I always end up asking what they listen to and what they read. So I decided the question deserves a home of its own. Each post is a mini-interview with someone about who they are and what they read, fiction and non-fiction. And since somebody has to go first, I’m interviewing myself.
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Who are you, and what do you do?
I’m Nune. I’ve been in IT for over 15 years now. I started as a mathematician, became a software engineer, then spent the last decade+ building and operating systems on and off the cloud. Along the way I founded a couple of companies, led a team that built an AI call center handling tens of thousands of calls a day, learned it’s impossible to create the perfect automation although I really really try to.
These days I live in Berlin, run a small consultancy where I help people diagnose their AI/Cloud issues and help them find a fix that suites them, host The Root Cause podcast, and write at thoughtfultechnologist.com. I’m also a certified yoga teacher, though lately I’ve been into strength exercises - all to keep my back healthy and ready for long hours in front of the computer.
What did you read growing up, and does it still show?
Books were my world growing up. They shaped me in a profound way.
I remember typing out Alice in Wonderland on an old typewriter, just because I wanted to feel on my fingertips what it’s like to write a book like that.
And there has been a lot of sci-fi in my life. Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Frank Herbert, Douglas Adams, the Strugatsky brothers, Stanislaw Lem, H.G. Wells.
The book I have to name first: Have Space Suit, Will Travel (Robert A. Heinlein). Probably the book I’ve re-read the most, and every single time it does the same thing to me: it wakes up this desire to learn and to understand how things work. Kip gets a used spacesuit and instead of hanging it on a wall, he takes it apart, learns every valve and circuit, and rebuilds it until he understands the whole system. And then that understanding saves his life. Every time I finish the book I want to go and disassemble something.
Some others I can name straight away:
Dune (Frank Herbert), especially the first book. Politics, ecology and religion as one interlocked system. I learned more about how organizations actually work from Dune than I think any management book can teach me.
Roadside Picnic (Arkady and Boris Strugatsky). A couple more re-reads and I would have become an ethical hacker. I definitely treat unknown systems the way a stalker treats the Zone: you don’t march in, you throw the bolt first, watch where it lands, and take one tested step at a time, slowly discovering the complexity underneath. That’s still how I debug: poke the safe places first, never assume it’s safe now. And every legacy production system is the Zone.
One Hundred Years of Solitude (Gabriel García Márquez). Everything repeats, everything goes in circles. Everything is a remix: hype cycles keep coming back, and bad managers pass bad habits to their teams the same way generational trauma is passed in families. Márquez runs the loop for a hundred years so you can learn to recognize it in year one.
From more recent reads I loved Dying Inside (Robert Silverberg): it teaches you how to let go of the things you thought make up who you are, and to keep living in the real world. I also loved the Expanse series (James S.A. Corey): among other things, Naomi Nagata is the best depiction of a woman in tech I’ve read. And Blindsight (Peter Watts): it made me question everything I assumed about how our brain works, and whether the conscious “me” is running the show or just writing the report afterwards.
Then there’s Children of Time (Adrian Tchaikovsky): it taught me how collectively we can work towards one goal, and arguably how matriarchy could have worked out ;) It also gave me a couple of nightmares, so if you have arachnophobia I’d suggest you stay away.
Does it still show? Sci-fi has definitely influenced me to become an engineer. It made me dream of technological worlds, and it made me want to be part of building them. I’d read about ships that think and machines with opinions, look up from the page, and feel almost offended that none of it existed yet. Somewhere between those pages “somebody should build this” quietly turned into “fine, I will”. The rest of the career was just picking up the tools.
And to this day I can’t help but ask for sci-fi recommendations on my podcast, and I keep referencing book characters in my articles. So... you tell me if it shows? :)
What are you reading right now?
Permutation City by Greg Egan. It’s a heavy read, but I must finish it. I have this feeling that I’ll only grasp the whole of it when I reach the end, and the concepts are too interesting to abandon halfway.
What strikes me most is how well a book from 1994 has aged. It has VR, artificial biology, AI, minds running as distributed agents on whatever hardware is cheapest at the moment (sounds familiar?), and simulated worlds creating worlds of their own. I work with distributed systems and AI agents daily, and here’s a thirty-year-old novel casually walking through concepts my industry presents as brand new.
UPDATE: I finished it and wrote a little review too.
I also picked up and almost finished now “Talk to Me: How to Ask Better Questions, Get Better Answers, and Interview Anyone Like a Pro” by Dean Nelson - which was a big help to structure my little interviewing experience.
What’s your fiction to non-fiction ratio, and are you happy with it?
Heavily tilted towards fiction, and here’s a confession: I have always had trouble reading technical books.
I don’t like reading best practices. I like discovering them, establishing them for myself. RTFM-ing and applying really…
I don’t know why, but I never wanted someone’s technical opinion influencing me before I’d learned the thing the hard way. Maybe that’s wrong, but that’s just who I am.
Recently though, something changed. I feel “strong enough” now, like whatever was supposed to form in me as a professional finally has, and someone else’s opinion is a conversation instead of a mold. So I’m reading Why Do We Still Suck at Resilience? and quite enjoying it. It’s a structured walk through why our systems keep failing in the same ways, and it keeps putting precise words to things I had only ever learned as scars. Twenty years in, and it turns out that’s exactly the right time to read a technical book.
The one non-fiction genre that never needed the twenty years: biographies, especially of songwriters. I think I know why. Teamwork between musicians looks a lot like teamwork in IT. You need to find people you vibe with, who are also technically good, and then you need to figure out how to actually work with each of them: who needs space and who needs pushing, whose ego you tune around, who carries the room when the energy drops. A band that survives is a small team that solved all of that, without a single org chart. Even finding gigs is a lot like finding IT work: you audition, you get rejected, and in the end it’s the people you played with before who call you for the next one. At least I draw the similarities.
Things the Grandchildren Should Know by Mark Oliver Everett, the Eels frontman, hit home some years ago, and so did Brother Ray, Ray Charles’s autobiography. And my all-time summertime reading is Bossa Nova: The Story of the Brazilian Music That Seduced the World by Ruy Castro. It just has this summer smell to it that I can’t shake. Or finish the book, for years now 😄
Want in?
If you want to hear recommendations from someone specific: tell me who, and I’ll try to beg them to share 😃)
If you want to contribute yourself: drop me an email at post@readsthis.org and I’ll send you the questions. Nothing formal, just 4-5 questions to get to know you as a reader.
I hope you are reading. Especially in this day and age, I think that matters even more.
Love,
Nune