wisdom
Some bits of wisdom: much of it about technology, spirituality, and free sustainable living -- that I've collected and wanted to keep somewhere.
Have suggested reading? Open an issue!
+: I found particularly insightful; recommended.
Healing from Trauma
- + The Body Keeps Score: the most effective & interesting book I've ever read on trauma. This helped me so much in understanding what trauma is, the depths of how it effects us, and how to start to heal. Highly recommended if you have trauma or even suspect you might.
Sustainable Living
- (WIP) + The Bay Area Forager by Mia Andler and Kevin Feinstein
- Rob Greenfield
- The Moneyless Manifesto by Mark Boyle
- Moneyless World
- + The Man Who Quit Money by Mark Sundeen
- + Voyaging on a Small Budget by Annie Hill
- (WIP) + Walden by Henry Thoreau
Self Growth
- Religion for the Nonreligious
- Taming the Mammoth: Why You Should Stop Caring What Other People Think
Spirituality
"General" Spirituality
- + A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle
- + Peace Pilgrim
Taoism
Stoicism
- The Enchiridion by Epictetus
- Eckhart Tolle on "Epictetus & Stoicsim"
- Ego is the Enemy by Ryan Holiday
- The Discipline of Assent
Buddhism & Zen
- + Fearless: The 7 Principles of Peace of Mind by Brenda Shoshanna
- Reflections of Zen
- Rebel Budda by Dzogchen Ponlop
- + The Issue at Hand by Gil Fronsdal
- + Fear: Essential Wisdom for Getting Through the Storm by Thich Nhat Hanh
- Smile at Fear by Chogyan Trungpa
- Expect Nothing by Clarice Bryan
- Stages of Meditation by Dalai Lama XIV
- The Best Buddhist Writing of 2011 by Melvin McLeod (Editor), various
- Peace is Every Step by Thich Nhat Hanh
- + Radical Acceptance by Tara Brach
- + The Authentic Life by Ezra Bayda
- The Zen of You and Me by Diane Musho Hamilton
- + Everyday Zen by Charlotte Joko Beck
Technology
success
Hamming, "You and Your Research" aggregation of marginal gains repititions, not goals plan for failure
"Success is a few simple disciplines, practiced every day; while failure is simply a few errors in judgment, repeated every day." โJim Rohn
fundamentals-oriented thinking
Cutting through to what matters
This is not a general disdain for the new: they want to see innovation as much as anybody, but are skeptical of newborn frameworks, tools and technologies that fail to embody the timeless principles that they've found most valuable.
Frameworks descend and burn up in the atmosphere like meteors. Technology changes fast enough that todayโs problems are never tomorrowโs problems. Historically, our greatest technologies have been created by those who kept digging until they hit bedrock; who understood foundational ideas and technologies well enough to improve upon them.
problem solving
software engineering
It's hard to get new developers interested in a software project if we force them to not just learn how it works, but also how it got there, because its process of evolution is so critical to the final shape it ended up in. [...] These kinds of clever tricks incur, not a technical, but a social debt that strictly accrues over time.
it's better for your tool to be dumb and work in predictable ways than to implement surprising "convenience" behaviors. The presence of magic numbers set by default is a good indicator that some tool is too "smart" for its own good and will cause you grief.
a note about git commit messages
How to Design a Good API and Why it Matters
hacking
"Applied Philosophy a.k.a. 'Hacking'"
node & javascript
the unix way
Many Things; in particular:
When frameworks make your decisions for you, you very often won't even realize that a decision has been made at all so it's much harder to identify problems when the assumptions grounded in that technology choice no longer apply.
open source community
How to Capture an Open Source Project
power structures in society
Types of Anticapitalism & Real Utopias
'Teaching a man to fish' parable is a lie
The Tyranny of Structurelessness
Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered
technology
Holistic and Prescriptive Technologies
Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television
Notes toward a Neo-Luddite Manifesto
The Internet with a Human Face
productivity
no internet makes you significantly more productive than bad internet -- @feross
meta
see also meta-knowledge