Is the prerequisite of this book SICP? Thanks.

Beginning of Infinity - David Deutsch Personal Knowledge - Michael Polanyi

Beginning of Infinity

An excellent book. David Deutsch is a talented writer and this is one of those books that shifts the way you look at the world.

RIP, Gerald Weinberg

There's a less know book written by him: Weinberg on Writing: The Fieldstone Method

It's the only book I've found that teaches you how to steal like an writer, which the book Steal Like an Artist advocates but doesn't get into how to actually do it.

"Obstacle is the Way": Basically a collection of motivational stories that pretends to be related to stoicism.

A better books is: "A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy"

Hand made hero https://handmadehero.org

Ken Thompson wrote Unix in a month.

Allegedly, it took him a month - https://www.princeton.edu/~hos/Mahoney/expotape.htm. But the idea had probably been growing on him for several years, while working on very similar projects.

I think this actually supports my idea of letting ideas grow on you before executing them.

Further it's a tiny subset of MULTIC project that he worked on for some time. Some of MULTIC design ended up in UNIX. One can argue UNIX's design began as far back as that where he was doing something else but pivoted in new project with weaker hardware.

Wasn't that all he was doing? Also, could be mistaken, but pretty sure he was Ken Thompson.

Become an independent scholar.

Travel and meet top researchers I admire and learn from them.

Solve real human problems.

Coding the Matrix: Linear Algebra through Applications to Computer Science

for more theoretical I'm planning to read: Vector Calculus, Linear Algebra, and Differential Forms: A Unified Approach

Damien Katz - CouchDB and Me: https://www.infoq.com/presentations/katz-couchdb-and-me

The talk is about how Damien quit his job to hack on open source software. It shows his struggle and doubt while embarking on the project and then finally invented CouchDB. It's a passionate and human account of the process of creating something significant. I recommend every hacker watch this.