Category: Books

Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir, Book Review

~ Veselin ~ 11 Comments

Gideon is a young and charming young woman, master swordsman. She happens to be raised in a world ruled by necromancers with many terrible risks associated with this craft. Death being a relatively small risk given that the necromancers around can imprison your soul, use your bones, or both.

The book has a logical magical system, and a grimdark atmosphere, horror-ish, which is in a stark contrast with Gideon’s positive and bubbly attitude. I loved both and have no objections.

However, there’s lots of death in the book and it’s sad, very sad. I didn’t like that part.

Overall, 5/5 but I do not recommend it because of the overall sadness.

Scott Berkun on Values

~ Veselin ~ 11 Comments

Talking about values and virtue signaling is easy. But sacrifice is hard and often unobserved. We don’t get as much credit from others for living up to our values, as we do for merely proclaiming them on social media or t-shirts.

— Scott Berkun on his Substack blog

Scott Berkun is an inspirational writer. He worked on the Internet Explorer team between versions 1 and 5. He also lead a team at Automattic, an experience he documented in the book The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work.

I keep writing about kindness and using every opportunity to treat people well. His post resonated a lot with me because it challenges a thing I value highly. Kindness usually costs little, requires no sacrifice, and can be visible. Scott Berkun says this is not a real value. Even worse, promoting kindness as a public statement could be like wearing a patriotic t-shirt.

This is not a new idea but a new point of view that hasn’t crossed my mind before. The Bible has lots of quotes that give a definition of good, and the lack of publicity is a common requirement.

But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret.

— Matthew 6:3

For example, is it a good thing when you hand free iPhones to strangers for views on YouTube? It costs something so it checks the first requirement but is done in public so it doesn’t check the second. Same with pretty much any act of kindness that’s done for views or shared on social media.

I need to think more about this.

Spring Harvest

~ Veselin ~ 2 Comments

An evil person invented the International Book Day and all the local publishers came up with massive discounts.

I restricted myself. One of my rules for buying and owning books is that I won’t buy entire series, only the first book of the series. If I like that book, I’d get the second book, and so on. Buying is more expensive that way but it helps me navigate the book clutter. They take space.

Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams, Book Review

~ Veselin ~ 13 Comments

Sarah Wynn-Williams wrote a memoir about her times as a very ambitious young executive, working on international policies at Facebook. She was close to but not close with Mark Zuckerberg, Joel Kaplan, Sheryl Sandberg, and Elliot Schrage.

First half of the book describes her work. It was what I hoped to read when I took that book. It describes hard-working people, self-absorbed, ambitious, awkward, making honest mistakes, stupid mistakes, moving on, forgiving. Lots of internal politics, relationships, some favoritism and harassment. I managed to extract a positive idea out of it and wrote a post- Think Wrong, Move Fast and Break Things. I wish the book stopped there and the shocking airplane bed was the last chapter.

The second half is like swimming in a pool full of excrements with an occasional crocodile. All of the mentioned names lose their souls in the pursuit of goals, which seems to be humanly random and randomly human but completely unacceptable. One wants to promote a book probably filled with lies. Another wants to sleep with everyone from the opposite gender using his authority as a leverage. A third wants to be the emperor of Rome but realizes he’s already surpassed that. And all of them show the empathy of a hungry crocodile. But that’s only the beginning of the dreaded second part.

Then Sarah Wynn-Williams goes into details about election meddling, promoting violence and confrontation as an engagement tool, helping the far-right politicians and dictators around the globe because that would allow a better growth for the company, and even accuses Facebook for treason with their activities in China. She describes individual poops from the poop pool.

I knew Facebook is used that way – every time I watch more than 10 Facebook shorts, one will be by a pro-Russian troll account and maybe 3-4 will use other people’s content. They don’t hesitate to block my posts when I link to this blog but have never positively responded to a hate speech report or removed a fraudulent advertisement that I reported to my memories. Their moderation for Bulgaria has always been oddly biased in favor of anti-democratic forces. But the events from the book describe that in a world-level scale, engineered to be that way for money and power.

I don’t know if the book is true. I found Sarah Wynn-Williams’s Senate hearing, trying to get an impression. I can’t quite relate to any of these people, the author, the interviewers but it matches my expectations. It’s a cautionary tale about why the free, independent, and decentralized web is important, why and how the walled gardens are harming our society, and why kids should not be allowed to use social media.

I’m on Facebook, my friends are there. What do I do?

Think Wrong, Move Fast and Break Things

~ Veselin ~ 6 Comments

I’m currently reading Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams. I’m less than halfway through, but it already feels like this book deserves more than one post. So far, it doesn’t paint Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg as supervillains, and I’m getting a glimpse into Facebook’s early culture.

One of the big ideas from Facebook’s early years was Move Fast and Break Things. This mantra has been both confirmed working and disproved many times – often by engineers like me, who’ve lived through its successes and catastrophic failures. .

Moving Fast and Breaking Things Works

It works because the software industry can be like a gator-infested pool. When a new idea drops like a piece of meat in the pool, everyone jumps on it. The biggest reward goes to the fastest gator that ships first and markets well. There’s often no time to make things well.

Facebook won the social network race in large parts of the world. Twitter and a few others got the leftovers. But this principle applies beyond tech giants – down to much smaller scales. It’s a form of the Pareto principle: 80% of the outcomes stem from 20% of the causes. If you can roughly identify the 20% and validate an idea quickly, you’ve already won even if it doesn’t work. You saved the effort for something that may work.

On an individual level, it also feels like it works. You get a task, you ship something quickly – it shows up in your weekly update, your team’s update, maybe even the leadership sees it. You’re productive, visible, and valuable.

But It Also Doesn’t Work

Once an idea is validated, it gains users, traction, and revenue. A bug that shows up once in 1000 runs might never happen with 10 users/day. Once you have a million users, it happens 1000 times a day. Also, one broken user profile may be easily fixable but a million? Not so much.

Zuckerberg himself cited this kind of thinking when Facebook moved away from the motto around 2014. You can’t keep patching the same issues over and over at scale. Stability becomes a requirement.

From an individual contributor point of view, it looks that profitable ideas attract many layers of heavily invested people – technical, marketing, finance, data, legal, executive, investors. And when something breaks, you’re not just dealing with bugs. You’re affecting dashboards, KPIs, morale, and your own job security. Blame becomes easier to assign. 10 of these people will know how things work and won’t blame you but the eleventh may have a bad day and push the button.

How to make a difference?

In early-stage product development or during moments of intense change, moving fast and breaking things can be the right move. But in mature projects, where uptime matters and stakeholders are many, the priority shifts. It’s more about stability, reliability, and trust.

Ultimately, Mark Zuckerberg hung that motto on Facebook’s wall – and eventually took it down. He may put it back up if he recognizes a need for it. Recognizing the moment is a key part of leadership.