DEV Community

Cover image for Interesting stuff I stumbled on #1
Jean-Michel Plourde
Jean-Michel Plourde

Posted on

Interesting stuff I stumbled on #1

Every day, I have to walk 20-30 minutes to work and like everyone I have daily maintenance tasks so it's the perfect time to listen to podcasts. I also enforce a 1-hour no-screen time before bed so I mostly read books. Whenever I have free time, I either read articles in my Pocket list, open a book, listen to a podcast or watch videos.

I just want to expose the interesting stuff I stumbled upon during my week.

Podcasts

I love listening to Joe Rogan podcasts. The guy is brilliant and well articulated plus with a ton of episodes with very interesting guests. While the format is very long, I am never disappointed by the content

Naval Ravikant on Joe Rogan Experience: Ravikant is an entrepreneur and an angel investor in the tech industry. He is also a futurist and has interesting takes on how humanity will involve with tech. Ravikant his mostly active on twitter where you can read his most popular and very humble threads like How to get rich (without getting Lucky) and some of his tech predictions.

Jamie Metzl on Joe Rogan Experience: Metzl is also a tech futurist, a geopolitics expert, a novelist and an entrepreneur. He discusses about how we will one day crack the code of our genome so we can make ourselves super human. He demonstrates that for the past several years we already engineered plants and animals. I will definitely get a look at his book Hacking Darwin.

Software Engineering Daily: Netflix Early Days with Greg Burrell: Did you know that Netflix is already 14 years old ? And that it used to offer DVD-by-mail service ? Me neither! Burrell is one of the first employees Netflix hired and he is still working for them. He explains how it used to run in the early days and what challenges they faced when they pivoted to being a streaming platform. Great insight on how work with teams and different services inside a huge company. I was drawn to this podcast because in the last few months, I was really interested in resilience engineering.

Articles

It made me geek out about my Linux distro in a way I haven't in a while because of the routine of my work which is focusing more on delivering features than taking time to sharpen my tools. Lots of good tools and tweaks to try, in fact there is some I didn't know about so I tried them and was very surprised how awesome they are.

Projects

Nintendo 64 Introductory Manual: The N64 is without a doubt ingrained in our culture. As a kid, I had a blast playing Golden Eye with my friends. Now that I am a developer, I look back a tech that marked my childhood. This introductory manual explains how it works under the hood with great details, clear explanations and helpful schemes.

WTF Python: For me, I find the best way to learn things is by breaking them, literally. Python is an awesome programming language and like any tech it has its weird and unexpected behaviors. Reading these puzzling anomalies made me understand the language on a totally different angle.

Books

Spaceman: An Astronaut's Unlikely Journey to Unlock the Secrets of the Universe by Mike Massimino: I just couldn't put the book town. I'm a fan of astronaut biographies because their journeys are full of hard work, ups and downs and adventures. You realise they are humans, they have their struggles and they kept fighting adversities. Truly inspiring.

Animal farm by George Orwell: I already had read 1984 and I was thrilled to read Animal Farm when I friend lended me the book. What would happen if animals on a farm made a rebellion and overthrew the owner to run the farm ? I always liked dystopian stories. There is a powerful quote in this book particularly shook me: All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others

Voila!

If you ever read/listen/watch something in that list, tell me how you liked it.
You can also follow me on goodreads.com

Top comments (4)

Collapse
 
deciduously profile image
Ben Lovy

+1 for Animal Farm! One of my favorites.

Collapse
 
jmplourde profile image
Jean-Michel Plourde

Very short book packed with an interesting story. A kind of book I really appreciate

Collapse
 
deepu105 profile image
Deepu K Sasidharan

Thanks for the mention

Collapse
 
jmplourde profile image
Jean-Michel Plourde

My pleasure! I really enjoyed your article