Inspired by Fogus, here are the great things I read, watched, discovered in 2024.

Highlights from 2023

Favorite Articles

Tossed Salads And Scrumbled Eggs: Rebuke of Scrum Hilarious and painfully accurate summary of use of “agile” in our industry.
Pluralistic: My McLuhan lecture on enshittification (FT, YouTube): Coined by Cory Doctrow, enshittification became word of the year. Once you understand this pattern, you will see it everywhere. I see it in Swiggy/Zomato apps which have started charging “platform fees” in addition to 30%+ commission they charge the restaurants. In MyGate they removed the option to allow entry through notification, instead you now have to open the app which has an ad. Pattern is common in the tech industry. Discount products/services heavily making it impossible for smaller/local players to compete, and once you gain monopoly start squeezing the users.
Religion of Techno-optimism: It has become easier over last couple of years to see through the manipulative narrative. Power & money breeds more greed while hollowing out morality. Under the false promise of a future tech utopia VCs will insist founders & employees should work harder, governments should reduce regulation and try to justify the illegal means. One bright spot for me, even pro-tech forums like Hackernews have started see through the evil.

Favorite Books

It was a good year of reading for me. I finally resumed the hobby and read 22 books through the year. Here are some of my favorites.

Fire upon the deep by Vernor Vinge: The ideas in just first 150 pages can result in 6 books. AI, zones of thought, tines, galactic information network and many more. These are wrapped in a great space opera. My favorite book so far. Highly recommended if you want to get into SciFi.
Blindsight by Peter Watts: Incredibly heady. At its core, this first contact story deals with what it means to be conscious through lens of neurology, game theory and evolution. Oh, and it has vampires too!
We who are about to by Joanna Russ: Most fearless book I’ve read. A small group of humans get stranded on an uninhabited planet and struggle to survive. The prose is unapologetic and author seems to not care how her peers, industry or even the readers will judge her work. This is reflected in the book’s protagonist’s actions as well. Great short read.
Permutation City by Greg Egan: What if you could clone yourself placed in VR universe? What would the identity of the clone differ to yours. What if world moves from constrained compute capacity to infinite one. Thought-provoking concepts. I didn’t particularly enjoy the story or the characters as much. Would have been more impactful as a shorter book in my opinion.
Blood Music by Greg Bear: 1985 novel about a virus like “noocytes” which are intelligent and become massive civilizations within the body.
Hothouse by Brian Aldiss: Only SciFi book I have read about plants/trees. Brilliant imagination.

The Thing by John Carpenter (1982): Atmospheric thriller with incredible direction, music and writing. Criminally underrated masterpiece.
Tremors (1990): Its a masterclass in how to write a perfect screenplay.
Society of the Snow (2024): Survival story of a rugby team crashing in the Andes. Based on a true stiry.
Conclave (2024)
The substance (2024): Body horror in the hands of an assured director.
Will & Harper (2024): Sweet documentary about friendship and coming out.
Challengers (2024): Romantic sports drama backed by fantastic acting and background music.

Twilight ContraPoints: YouTube sometimes has these incredible gems. ~3 hour video deconstructing desire, power dynamics, masochism, sexuality through Twilight movies (of all things). Natalie Wynn read 100+ books, has so many citations. This could have been a pHD dissertation.
Rachel Maddow talks with David Remnick at the 2024 New Yorker Festival: Interview with Rachel Maddow about how society moves towards fascism.

Photography: Passed. I took my gear (Fujifilm XS-20 with a 18mm f1.4 lens) to 2 trips this year and some of the pics turned out awesome. Hoping to improve my skills and take more pics in 2025.
Restart Defogtech: Failed. I have been meaning to restart Defogtech but another year of intense work kept me away from it. I lacked enough mental energy to resurrect posting videos.
Read more books: Partially passed. I read 22 books in 2024 though none of them were technical.

Restart Defogtech (really): In some positive news, I have now moved from being an Engineering Manager to Staff Engineer @Google. This means, I can now be involved in technical work 100% of the time. Hopefully this gives me enough time and energy to focus on DefogTech.
Write a book on Java: Along with the technical work, I want to write a book. Since writing books are 1+ year of effort, I want to start with book on Java Concurrency (with large overlap of content with existing DefogTech videos) followed by book on Modern Java. Lets see if there is enough support in terms of intent to buy the book from the subscribers.
Continue reading: I plan to continue reading in 2025 targeting reasonable 24 books (2 books a month). This time I want to have a healthy mix of technical & fiction books.