Summary of 2019

Yet another year almost pasted and I have no idea even when. Not the best one, but thankfully not the worst.

Let’s focus only on good things:

• The first time I was in the mountains in the winter on a trip (twice!). There were days when we didn’t meet anybody on a track. I observed how Marcin made timelapses from Beskid Sądecki and Beskid Mały. He is a great photographer,
• At work, I created a fully distributed jenkins environment for building software. I can simply exchange base toolchains, enable new fancy static analysis checks, and more. It’s quite well prepared for scale problems – I can easily extend the number of workers without any IT support,
• I started to play go. It’s definitely more complicated than chess. I still play with my Sensei Jarosław. He has 16 years of experience with go and how you can imagine, I still losing games even with 9 handicaps.

I had also a pleasure to read a few books. I think that the list is almost complete. If I missed something it was to short or not worth mentioning.

Thinking, fast and slow by Daniel Kahneman (ISBN 978-83-7278-710-1)

The Polish title is Thinking Traps, but I think that the English version is more accurate. Our brain has different modes, and in most cases is in the lazy mode – called here the fast thinking – that’s the problem. We have to learn to recognise complex situations and use the slower part of it. In the beginning, the book is very interesting, but closer to the end, I started noticing that presented problems are very similar. Most of traps are math problems, or to be more specific their come from the theory of probability.

The Heart Against the Rock by Adrian Pracoń (ISBN 978-83-764-2201-5)

This time the Polish title is more meaningful: Massacre on the island of Utøya. The survivor describes his story. It’s not big literature, but if are you curious about what happened on Utøya, from the first hand, it’s a good position.

Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari (ISBN 978-83-08-06658-4)

The book about us and who we may become in the future. I don’t agree with many theses presented by Yuval Noah Harari. The worth mentioning is the thing which I had learned from it – each of us has a different definition of happiness. You and only you decide what makes you happy.

King Rat by James Clavell (ISBN 978-83-7998-079-6)

On the first level, it’s the book about prisoners of war camp. On the second level, it’s about us – humans.

Thinner by Stephen King (ISBN 978-83-7985-231-4)

The title describes everything. A woman holds Billy under a charm. He becomes thinner and thinner. A classical King’s horror.

Four past Midnight by Stephen King (ISBN 978-83-7985-223-9)

Another classical King’s horror. This time all revolve around a plane and time travel.

Different Seasons by Stephen King (ISBN 978-83-7885-008-3)

Collection of novels. I hadn’t recognised that I had read this book before. But when I had seen again titles The Shawshank Redemption and Apt Pupil, I had smiled and started reading. I suppose that most of you know the first title, but the second novel is tremendous.

Humans: A Brief History of How We F*cked It All Up by Tom Phillips (ISBN 978-83-8125-627-8)

If you think that Trump or lame dwarf is the worst thing that may happen to your country you are wrong, so wrong. History is full of foolish, mad people. Compare your current dictator with Ibrahim. Humans describes the most messed up lords and their fancy ideas.

Permanent Record by Edward Snowden (ISBN 978-83-66360-25-9)

I had read the first book about Edward Snowden No Place to Hide by Glenn Greenwald (ISBN 978-832-681-610-9) around 2015. It was about his disclosure, privacy, and invigilation. A great biography the Permanent Record is about Edward’s life. You can find out why he had access to all NSA digital data and how he realised that he has to reveal top secret documents. The funny fact is that during the reading book, the Pegasus – Product Description leaked.

A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson (ISBN 978-83-65521-27-9)

The best book of this year. It goes thought many branches of science and describes the current state of knowledge. I was amazed many times when I found out about assumptions that took a scientist to prove something. There are so many different opinions about basic rights, rules, and in many cases the strongest wins – it doesn’t mean that this one is true. The most surprising for me was the fact that even in the XXI century, we almost know nothing about oceans.

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