Summary

Outliers challenges the traditional status quo that outliers, those truly dominant in their field, succeed based off intelligence, hard work, and determination alone. Outliers attempts to show that culture, environment, and opportunities — factors largely out of your control — are as or more important for success than IQ and innate ability.

Outliers is an extremely easy to read book with entertaining examples from various disciplines and cultures. It makes you rethink the traditional notion that success is the result of individual drive and achievement by putting the focus on the world around you.

Ultimately, the main thesis is weak and breaks down. Outliers are extremely hard working. As much as environment and culture play a role, the common denominator for success is passion and drive. Certainly environment and culture play a large part in the success of the elite, but internal passion and drive remain key. …

When you hear about Silicon Valley’s great success stories — Intel, Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook, you inevitably hear the names of founders and key executives — Steve Jobs, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Jeff Bezos, Marisa Mayer, or Sheryl Sandberg.

Unless you dig deep, you won’t hear the name Bill Campbell. Yet if you peel back the covers of those companies, those people, you’ll find Bill Campbell. Bill Campbell was a football coach turned tech executive turned executive coach for the who’s who of Silicon Valley’s elite leaders and companies.

Most people are lucky to be involved with one, maybe two successful companies during their career. How was he able to influence so many leaders at so many companies? How could he possibly convince Steve Jobs to let him sit on Apple’s board while at the same time coaching Google’s entire executive team? …

Overview

Creative Selection, written by former Apple software engineer Ken Kocienda, describes Apple’s culture and development process under the aptly titled “golden age” of Steve Jobs during the 2000s.

This was definitely one, if not the, most successful periods in corporate history for any single company. The late 90’s and 2000s saw Apple roll out an astonishing series of product successes including the iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad (technically released in 2010), as well as software hits like Safari, iOS, and extensive macOS improvements.

Creative Selection follow’s Ken’s career from Eazel software in 1999, to Apple during 2001–2017, where he worked as a software engineer on Safari and the “Purple” project — what ultimately became known to the world as iPhone OS and what we know today as iOS. …

Work is an increasingly important and demanding part of our lives. We spend more waking hours of our lives working than we do with our spouses, families, or our hobbies. Work forms our identity, is a source of pride and accomplishment, and for most, a primary source of income. Test

But how often do you step back and put work into perspective? What role does work have in your life? Why are you working so hard? What are your life goals and what role does work contribute to those goals? …

The Beginning

On the 1st day, we built the monolith. The monolith served our business well, revenues grew, and the world was right.

On the 2nd day, we hired another team. And another. And one overseas. And the monolith grew.

On the 3rd day, we had merge conflicts. We fought thru them. And again, the monolith grew.

On the 4th day, our architect read posts from Netflix engineering on microservices, drank coffee, and wrote a “microservices manifesto” — laying out the battle plan to strategically break apart our monolith into a set of services (which she kept calling “enterprise capabilities”, but in reality they are just REST services which focused on one thing. …

The truth is we all worship something. Something gets us out of bed in the morning, controls our inner voice, and pushes us to strive in life. Money, jobs, kids, hobbies, celebrities, comfort, happiness, and the list goes on.

Everyone is driven by something. Everyone has an idol.

Counterfeit Gods is a book from Pastor Tim Keller on idols. Keller examines common worldly idols, concluding that the only true idol that matters is Jesus Christ.

Introduction

The Setting

Counterfeit Gods was written in 2009, during the heart of the financial collapse and US recession. Tim Keller, the author, is the pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan. Redeemer is one, if not the, largest church in New York City. He’s a remarkable preacher, writer. …

Since iOS’s introduction in March 2008, almost 11 years ago, the core iOS MVC architecture hasn’t materially changed. Over the years, as applications have become more complex, the limits and shortcomings of MVC and UIKit have prompted developers to develop and use alternative architectures.

App Architecture: iOS Application Patterns in Swift examines different architectural approaches for building software on iOS. While all architectures are slightly different, the book describes the common themes of separation of concerns, immutability, unidirectional data flow, and testability are foundational concepts underlying these architectures which all developers should strive for when building high quality software. While the book isn’t about the concepts per se, the concepts are the most important thing to take away from this book. …

Happy New Year! I’m writing this on January 1st, 2019. The day of the year where millions of people make resolutions and set goals to change their lives for the better.

But what resolutions are they making? What resolutions are you making? I want to challenge you — are your resolutions truly meaningful?

I came across a list of the top resolutions made by Americans and I was sort of disappointed. I feel we can and should resolve to set resolutions that align to our life’s work. Resolutions that are bold and meaningful. Resolutions that have deeper meaning and value not only to ourselves, but for others. …