Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

Tony Fadell

Twenty-five years ago, more or less, I ran a start-up company. I wish books like this had existed back then to help me understand what start-ups need to do.

Fadell has perhaps the best pedigree imaginable, including being involved both in massive successes (the iPod, the iPhone, the Nest thermostat) and crashing failures (General Magic), and the best thing about this book is his willingness to share them, warts and all. He’s clearly come to a place in his life where he regards everything as a learning opportunity and a teaching opportunity, rather than needing to project a particular image of himself.

The business advice is fascinating, even for someone who doesn’t intend to start a company: there’s plenty to learn about organisation structures and politics. I suspect it’d be absolute gold for anyone thinking of making hardware devices for the modern software-dominated world, though. Fadell has a clear understanding of what’s needed to make a physical product succeed, and his emphases on story-telling and understanding the customer’s journey as a route to success are compelling.

There’s also a lot of insight into some of the major companies and personalities he’s met along the way. He’s positive about Apple, clear-eyed about Steve Jobs’ strengths and weaknesses – and clearly quite shell-shocked by his exposure to Google as not what he was expecting them to be.

5/5. Finished Saturday 3 August, 2024.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

SS-GB

Len Deighton (1979)

An alternative history that has aged well. The premise is quite common: what if Nazi Germany had invaded Britain in the Spring of 1941, and succeeded? The plot revolves around rescuing the King and retrieving atomic secrets, both to be sent to America.

But it’s the politics of a Nazi occupation that clearly most fascinated Deighton, because he build a labyrinth of plots and counter-plots between Army, SS, British Resistance, and American isolationism. These internecine struggles are actually quite familiar from the actual history of Nazi occupations, so it’s quite fascinating to see them transplanted to a fictional Britain. It’s so well done that it’s a shame it isn’t part of a series (of which Deighton wrote several).

4/5. Finished Saturday 3 August, 2024.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

SS-GB (Penguin Modern Classics – Crime & Espionage)

Len Deighton (1979)

An alternative history that has aged well. The premise is quite common: what if Nazi Germany had invaded Britain in the Spring of 1941, and succeeded? The plot revolves around rescuing the King and retrieving atomic secrets, both to be sent to America.

But it’s the politics of a Nazi occupation that clearly most fascinated Deighton, because he build a labyrinth of plots and counter-plots between Army, SS, British Resistance, and American isolationism. These internecine struggles are actually quite familiar from the actual history of Nazi occupations, so it’s quite fascinating to see them transplanted to a fictional Britain. It’s so well done that it’s a shame it isn’t part of a series (of which Deighton wrote several).

4/5. Finished Saturday 3 August, 2024.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

Metacircular Semantics for Common Lisp Special Forms

Metacircular Semantics for Common Lisp Special Forms

Henry G. Baker. Metacircular Semantics for Common Lisp Special Forms. ACM SIGPLAN Lisp Pointers V, pp.11–20. 1992.

A response to the criticisms of McCarthy’s semantics for Common Lisp that it didn’t specify the behaviours of special forms, and of the standardisation process of adopting prose definitions that are too “lawyerly” for engineering.

The approach is to define the special forms in terms of other constructions, for example if in terms of nested lambda abstractions to prevent execution of the unwanted branch. This is both useful for understanding and a way of minimising the number of under-defined special forms.

It suggests treating catch / throw as basic, both because other control-transfer forms can be expressed sing them and because it emphasises the interactions that preclude Common Lisp having continuations like Scheme’s. However there’s also an argument pursued that some other structures (like values) provide extra information that can be useful for compilers looking to optimise. It’s a deep exploration of the underpinnings of the language from both theoretical and practical perspectives.

Casting SPELs in Lisp

Casting SPELs in Lisp

https://www.lisperati.com/casting.html

A tongue-in-cheek – but still excellent – comicbook-style introduction to Lisp programming. (There’s also a version specifically for Emacs Lisp.) It’s structured around building an adventure-style game, which as well as being a classic also offers lots of opportunities for exploring different data structures and algorithms: one can easily imagine expanding it to include (for example) an AI second player or autonomous non-player characters and gradually building a really complicated application from a standing start.