I fell in love with reading – again

I have been an avid reader my whole life and have always collected books like an addict, but spent a large part of the last decade reading tech books non-stop and rarely, if ever, ventured into the fiction section of a bookstore or library until a few months ago. Since then, I have been on a big kick of reading (and in many cases, re-reading) some old classics and getting into more modern fiction. This has been a great shift for me and got me through the recent trend of nearly non-stop work due to a big project launch. When reading nothing but technology books along with a major development push that lasts months, it begins to wear on you; In a negative way. Being able to really get into fiction helped me in being able to “shut off” work and immerse myself in a novel, even if just for 15-30 minutes at night. I also have found this has helped me in just my day-to-day thinking about new ideas, depending on the type of book I was reading. I’m still a sucker for non-fiction and historical books, but even those at least get me out of the “engineer” mentality, depending on the subject.

Resource-wise, Goodreads has helped me find new books and the free iPhone app has been indispensable when I’m at the library or bookstore and trying to remember a book or author that I wanted to check out.

Tonight I saved myself the future stress and simply deleted what I had begun writing, in many cases, from late 2009.

The craziest thing to me, in reading my half-written posts, is seeing how far I have come since last fall as a developer. I have read so many books either again (The Pragmatic Programmer) or for the first time (Domain Driven Design by Eric Evans) that have changed how I view software development and how I view previous choices I made in my career. Had I made the effort to really understand more years ago, I'd have experienced a lot less friction in certain jobs, but that's what life is all about, I guess. Learning from mistakes and not repeating them… as often.

From here on out, no more pooling unfinished posts. I'm going to just throw out more raw notes on what I'm working on and go from there. I spend too much time making things "perfect". I know my writing isn't great but it is not going to get any better in hiding. Right?

Until the next post, go check out the books mentioned above and a couple others I have really enjoyed over the past few months. The link goes to my list on Amazon.

Recent Book List