
An unfortunate pattern pervades the world of nonfiction books. Every chapter begins with
a drawn-out story, before the author eventually circles back to reveal its central lesson.

This formula pads a dozen pages of useful information into a 200+ page slog. Instead of reading the
book in an afternoon, it might take you weeks to work through (if you finish it at all).

I don't know if the root cause is the author's [quest for status](https://borretti.me/article/non-fiction-has-bad-incentives),
the publisher enforcing their prescribed formula, or something else. Either way, the reader loses.

We should celebrate the books that eschew this blueprint, delivering a clear and forceful message
while staying concise and considerate of the reader's time.

Below are some of my favourite “short and punchy” authors and books.

Derek Sivers:

* [Useful Not True](https://sive.rs/u)
* [Hell Yeah or No](https://sive.rs/n)
* [Anything You Want](https://sive.rs/a)
* [Your Music and People](https://sive.rs/m)
* [How to Live](https://sive.rs/h)

37signals:

* [Shape Up](https://basecamp.com/shapeup/shape-up.pdf)
* [Getting Real](https://basecamp.com/gettingreal/getting-real.pdf)
* **Remote**
* **Rework**

Steven Pressfield:

* **The War of Art**
* **Turning Pro**

By others:

* [Refactoring UI](https://www.refactoringui.com/)
* [The Handbook](https://archive.org/details/epictetus-the-enchiridion) by Epictetus
* **The Psychology of Money** by Morgan Housel
* **The Bed of Procrustes** by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
* **Excellent Advice for Living** by Kevin Kelly
* **Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind** by Shunryu Suzuki
* **Several Short Sentences About Writing** by Verlyn Klinkenborg
* **Man's Search for Meaning** by Viktor Frankl

(I'll add more as I discover or remember them)


Short and punchy


I've finally cleared away the bitrot and gotten this new yearly review post out. It's weirdly satisfying to tend to my little personal online space, even if only for this annual post.

## Blogs I liked in 2024

Unlike this blog, there are many independent sites that publish high quality work at a regular cadence. I'm always on the lookout for more of them, but here are a few that I learned a lot from in 2024:

* [After Babel](https://www.afterbabel.com/) - on parenting, technology, mental health, and their intersections
* [Simon Willison](https://simonwillison.net/) - Still doing phenomenal work distilling the latest on LLMs
* [Fernando Borretti](https://borretti.me), [Max Böck](https://mxb.dev) - A few new-to-me programmer blogs I added to my feed list
* [Front-end Front](https://frontendfront.com) and [Sidebar.io](https://sidebar.io) - high signal/noise link aggregators

## Frontend tooling is good actually

In late 2023 I started toying with [Bun](https://bun.sh/), and in 2024 it became the default for every project I work on. Its speed and simplicity are wonderful compared to all of the moving parts you'd traditionally need to cobble together with Node/ts-node/Yarn/Webpack/Babel/etc.

I also replaced ESLint with [Biome](https://biomejs.dev/), and moved several projects to [Vite](https://vite.dev/). These tools may not have all the bells and whistles of their legacy equivalents, but they're simpler, faster, and meet all of my needs very well.

## Neovim is still fun

Late in the year I rediscovered my preferred outlet for [structured procrastination](https://structuredprocrastination.com/) - tweaking my neovim config. I discovered [mini.nvim](https://github.com/echasnovski/mini.nvim) and it is glorious. In evolving my setup from several old plugins to mini's modules, so far I've removed 12 plugins and several hundred lines of manual configuration, and even started my own colorscheme (I really didn't anticipate that last part). Looking forward to exploring mini and writing more Lua in 2025.

## Coding in the Age of AI

Don't worry, that subhead is tounge-in-cheek. Everyone in software development wote a similarly grandiose think piece this year, so here's my take: despite egregiously overdone hype, AI-assisted coding is already very useful, and it's going to be fascinating to see how the human-to-code interface evolves over the next few years.

I started out as a pretty big skeptic. Early versions of Copilot had latency bad enough to negate the benefits of AI
completions, and they were only useful about 15% of the time anyways.

But after switching to [Supermaven](https://supermaven.com/) this year I've appreciated that some
kind of AI developer augmentation is not just inevitable, but kind of great. Unfortunately,
Supermaven's now been acquired, so its developent seems to be over. I'd love to stay in Neovim, so
I'm curious what the next wave of editor-independent AI coding tools looks like.

This is all not to trivialize the degree of social and economic upheaval likely to be wrought by these
tools. I don't think it's going to be as bad as the doomers think, and for a curious and ambitious
generalist, I think the future looks very bright. We'll see how that view holds up in 5 years.

A few reads I've enjoyed on this topic:
* [Ignore the grifters - AI Isn't Going to Kill the Software Industry](https://dustinewers.com/ignore-the-grifters/)
* [Cheating is All You Need](https://sourcegraph.com/blog/cheating-is-all-you-need)

## Gadgetry

I'd resisted the "wearable" category of devices until 2024, but finally succumbed to a new Apple Watch in October. Purchased to help train for a half-marathon (mission accomplished), I've enjoyed its various health-tracking functions. I was apprehensive about bringing yet another [glowing rectangle](https://theonion.com/report-90-of-waking-hours-spent-staring-at-glowing-re-1819570829/) into my life, but in a surprising twist, moving a subset of notifications to my wrist has reduced the frequency and overall duration of my phone use. The bulkiness and battery life of the watch are not great, but overall it's been a net-positive.

Continuing on the theme of gadgets-that-stop-me-from-using-other-gadgets, I'm now into year 5 with my reMarkable 2 and it's still going strong. Carving out the first 30 minutes after waking to journal and plan on it with my morning coffee has been a great way to start the day. I try to do as much digital reading on the rM2 as possible and it's been great to continue to spend less time on my laptop.

## Books

As mentioned [last year](/posts/2023-review), my reading goal was to take notes and retain more, even if it meant I read less. And in fact that's exactly what happened– while I finished less than a book per week, I recorded a page of notes for 20 of them. Reviewing the notes was surprisingly helpful! I plan to keep up this practice and am now using a new template to write them up on my reMarkable. Some of my favourite reads for the year were:

* **The Anxious Generation** by Jonathan Haidt
* **Useful Not True** by Derek Sivers
* **Slow Productivity** by Cal Newport
* **Good Inside** by Becky Kennedy
* **Not the End of the World** by Hannah Ritchie
* **Several Short Sentences About Writing** by Verlyn Klinkenborg
* **The Infinite Game** by Simon Sinek
* **Burn Book** by Kara Swisher
* **How to Know a Person** by David Brooks
* **Outlive** by Peter Attia
* **Excellent Advice for Living** by Kevin Kelly

## Gratitude

On a personal note, 2024 was split into 2 parts– the first of stress and anxiety, and the second of
reflection and gratitude. In an increasingly uncertain world, I feel truly blessed to be healthy, safe, and most importantly, able to spend lots
of time with the people I love.


2024 Review


Hard to believe I have been doing these annual posts for over a decade now. Revisiting some of the
old entries triggered a strange mix of nostalgia and cringiness. But I am compelled, against all reason, to keep going! And thus, this post exists.

## New Tech

Dunking on the Rube Goldberg-esque complexity of the JavaScript ecosystem has been a well-trodden trope for
years. So it has been very refreshing to spend some time playing with [Bun](https://bun.sh/) in
late 2023. It's oversold as a "drop-in Node replacement", as many compatibility issues remain, but the speed and simplicity is a breath of fresh air. Bun's pace of development is truly impressive, too, and despite the lack of a sustainable funding model, it's been so fun to use that I'm considering moving a few projects from Node to Bun this year.

Of course LLMs were a fascinating topic in 2023. [Simon Willison's blog](https://simonwillison.com/) was, and continues to be, an engineering generalist's essential reading on the topic. ML is very far from my circle of competence but it's been fun to learn about a new field that is deep and fascinating.

## Reading

Regular readers of the blog (are there any?) will be familiar with my annual vanity metric– number
of books read in the year. Even as I smashed my previous record this year, I realized how pointless
and counter-productive this number is, given I retain very little of what I read. For 2024 my goal is to take a full page of notes for **20** high-quality books. I did this for only 9 books last year.

Retention issues aside, I enjoyed quite a few reads this year. Favourites were:

* **Rusty Brown** Chris Ware
* **Same as Ever** Morgan Housel
* **Drive** Dan Pink
* **Outlive** Peter Attia
* **Competing against Luck** Christensen et al
* **Building a Second Brain** Tiago Forte
* **From Strength to Strength** Arthur Brooks
* **Clear Thinking** Shane Parrish
* **Exhalation** Ted Chiang
* **Just Keep Buying** Nick Maggiuli
* **The Remains of the Day** Kazuo Ishiguro
* **You are Here** Thich Nhat Hanh
* **Invisible Boy** Harrison Mooney
* **Dilla Time** Dan Charnas
* **Hark! A Vagrant** and **Ducks** Kate Beaton
* **Lost and Founder** Rand Fishkin
* **Refactoring UI** Wathan & Schoger
* **Turning Pro** Steven Pressfield
* **Mind MGMT – Omnibus 1** Matt Kindt
* **Be Useful** Schwarzenegger

## Blogging and such

Last year I wrote down some nifty indieweb tech that I thought would be cool to explore on this
site, and predictably, none of those things came to fruition. One day, maybe. As usual
I didn't really write anything here, though I did do a little blogging [elsewhere](https://hyperpaper.me/blog). A few people even told me those posts were useful, which, if true, is probably a first for me.


2023 Review

An unfortunate pattern pervades the world of nonfiction books. Every chapter begins with
a drawn-out story, before the author eventually circles back to reveal its central lesson.
This formula pads a dozen pages of useful information into a 200+ page slog. Instead of reading the
book in an afternoon, it might take you weeks to work through (if you finish it at all).
I don't know if the root cause is the author's <a href="https://borretti.me/article/non-fiction-has-bad-incentives">quest for status</a>,
the publisher enforcing their prescribed formula, or something else. Either way, the reader loses.
We should celebrate the books that eschew this blueprint, delivering a clear and forceful message
while staying concise and considerate of the reader's time.
Below are some of my favourite “short and punchy” authors and books.
Derek Sivers:
<ul>
<li><a href="https://sive.rs/u">Useful Not True</a></li>
<li><a href="https://sive.rs/n">Hell Yeah or No</a></li>
<li><a href="https://sive.rs/a">Anything You Want</a></li>
<li><a href="https://sive.rs/m">Your Music and People</a></li>
<li><a href="https://sive.rs/h">How to Live</a></li>
</ul>
37signals:
<ul>
<li><a href="https://basecamp.com/shapeup/shape-up.pdf">Shape Up</a></li>
<li><a href="https://basecamp.com/gettingreal/getting-real.pdf">Getting Real</a></li>
<li>Remote</li>
<li>Rework</li>
</ul>
Steven Pressfield:
<ul>
<li>The War of Art</li>
<li>Turning Pro</li>
</ul>
By others:
<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.refactoringui.com/">Refactoring UI</a></li>
<li><a href="https://archive.org/details/epictetus-the-enchiridion">The Handbook</a> by Epictetus</li>
<li>The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel</li>
<li>The Bed of Procrustes by Nassim Nicholas Taleb</li>
<li>Excellent Advice for Living by Kevin Kelly</li>
<li>Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind by Shunryu Suzuki</li>
<li>Several Short Sentences About Writing by Verlyn Klinkenborg</li>
<li>Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl</li>
</ul>
(I'll add more as I discover or remember them)