A great deal happened in 2023, and my reading correspondingly decreased compared to previous years. Apart from philosophy, most of the other books I picked up were not finished cover to cover — though that is no reflection on their worth.
Social Sciences and Philosophy
As in previous years, whenever I find myself with a free moment I almost inevitably reach for something philosophical. Early in the year, my doctoral supervisor and I had a brief discussion around the question “who am I?”, and during that conversation he mentioned this book:
It addresses three classic questions with admirable clarity: What can I know? What should I do? And what may I hope for? Coming off last year’s encounter with nihilism, my own answers after finishing it were: I am the sum of my experiences — unique and irreplaceable — and I should seek out more things I have never experienced before, things that genuinely excite me, and then embrace those experiences wholeheartedly. As I dug further into questions of identity, consciousness, reductionism, and holism, my book purchases also came to include:
Though I never quite found the time to finish it. I also read Heidegger’s Being and Time — extraordinarily demanding, and likewise left unfinished:
Eventually I decided to take a step back and bought a history of philosophy, to build a more comprehensive understanding of how philosophical thought has developed over the centuries:
Beyond philosophy, the nature of my research led me to explore social choice theory, which grew out of sociology and economics:
Management
Last year I started working at a German company, and one topic that came up frequently in conversations with my manager was how to manage people well. He recommended several books, all of which I bought and read:
- The Manager’s Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change
- Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow
- The Responsibility Process: Unlocking Your Natural Ability to Live and Lead with Power
- A Philosophy of Software Design, 2nd Edition
Team Topologies deserves a few words of its own. I had actually come across Conway’s Law years ago through microservice architecture discussions, but at the time I only held onto the surface-level observation that “software architecture tends to mirror the organizational structure that produced it,” without going any deeper. Thinking about it in reverse, though, raises an interesting question: if senior management is not directly involved in writing software, how can they influence its architecture? One practical answer is to deliberately design the structure of teams — splitting a single team into several smaller, focused units, each with a distinct remit — and in doing so shape the architecture of the software those teams ultimately build. Team Topologies explores this from a practical standpoint in considerable depth, and I found it well worth reading.
Humanities
The humanities category includes:
- The Unicorn Project: A Novel About Developers, Digital Disruption, and Thriving in the Age of Data
- Kill It with Fire: Manage Aging Computer Systems (and Future Proof Modern Ones)
- The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed the World
Of these, The Undoing Project was my favourite. It tells the story of two Nobel laureates — Kahneman and Tversky — and stands as the definitive narrative account of the intellectual partnership behind the discovery of cognitive biases.
Engineering
Engineering books hold very little appeal for me at this point in my life. Most of these were bought purely as reference works, and I only consulted specific chapters as needed (though they are all good books):
- Decision Making under Deep Uncertainty: From Theory to Practice
- PostgreSQL Query Optimization: The Ultimate Guide to Building Efficient Queries
- Fundamentals of Software Architecture: An Engineering Approach.
- Causal Inference in Python: Applying Causal Inference in the Tech Industry
- Database Internals: A Deep Dive into How Distributed Data Systems Work
2023 这一年里发生了很多事情，对应的读物也相较以前有所减少，相比之下除了哲学类的读物之外，其他的书籍其实并没有读完（但并不代表他们都不值得读）。
社哲类
和去年一样，我几乎一闲下来就会开始读一些哲学类的书籍。年初的时候，我和我的博士导师 有就"我是谁"产生过简短的讨论，讨论中他提到了这本书：
这本书非常经典的讨论了三个问题：我可以知道什么？我应该做什么？以及我能期待什么？ 结合去年开始对虚无主义的接触，我读完后对自己的答案是：我是我体验的总和，它是独一无二的， 我应该去寻找更多的从未体验过并真正能够让我兴奋的事物，并期待和拥抱这些体验。 随着对身份、意识、还原论与整体论深入了解，我的购书记录中还包括这一本：
但是似乎我并没有机会能够读完这本。后来还读了海德格尔的《存在与时间》，非常难读，也没有读完：
后来索性买了一本哲学史，开始更加全面的对哲学的历史和发展体系进行了解：
除了哲学之外，因为所做研究的关系，进一步对社会学发展起来的社会选择理论进行了解：
管理类
去年我开始在一家德国的公司工作，其中一类频繁和老板讨论的话题就是如何做管理，老板提到过这么几本书， 我都买来读了读：
- The Manager’s Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change
- Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow
- The Responsibility Process: Unlocking Your Natural Ability to Live and Lead with Power
- A Philosophy of Software Design, 2nd Edition
其中 Team Topologies 单独聊一聊。很早年的时候其实从微服务架构中了解到过康威定律，但当时只对"软件架构正好反映了组织结构"有所印象，并没有更为深入的了解。其实反过来思考就是，更高的管理层如果不直接参与执行软件的实现，如何来影响软件的架构？一个可用的方法其实就是去设计团队的职能，将一个团队拆分为不同的小团队，各司其职，从而影响最终的实现的软件架构。在 Team Topologies 中有从实践的角度进行了更多的讨论，非常值得一读。
人文
人文类包括了这些书籍：
- The Unicorn Project: A Novel About Developers, Digital Disruption, and Thriving in the Age of Data
- Kill It with Fire: Manage Aging Computer Systems (and Future Proof Modern Ones)
- The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed the World
其中 The Undoing Project 是我最喜欢的一本，讲述了两位诺贝尔奖得主的故事，可以说是了解卡尼曼和特沃斯基发现认知偏差背后的故事的最佳纪实文学。
工程类
工程类对现在的我而言非常无趣，大部分只买来当了参考书，只查阅过其中部分章节（但都是好书）：
- Decision Making under Deep Uncertainty: From Theory to Practice
- PostgreSQL Query Optimization: The Ultimate Guide to Building Efficient Queries
- Fundamentals of Software Architecture: An Engineering Approach.
- Causal Inference in Python: Applying Causal Inference in the Tech Industry
- Database Internals: A Deep Dive into How Distributed Data Systems Work