I agree with all your points on why you should read... in fact I loved Crime & Punishment exactly for those reasons
I think its ok not to like Dostoyevsky, de gustibus - but you are implying that people read him to feel smart or that they need to put a great amount of effort in reading... great books have an healing effect even when tired and at the end of the day...
> Spend time where your customers are and make your own conclusions.
This is a great article, very well-written, and I enjoyed reading it. However, could intuition and spending time with customers be considered another way of collecting data points to inform data-driven decisions?"
About the travelling salesperson problem, below is a quote from the latest Sapolsky's book Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will. I am not sure how relevant this is for software developers, but still fascinating:
"An ant forages for food, checking eight different places. Little ant legs get tired, and ideally the ant visits each site only once, and in the shortest possible path of the 5,040 possible ones (i.e., seven factorial). This is a version of the famed “traveling salesman problem,” which has kept mathematicians busy for centuries, fruitlessly searching for a general solution. One strategy for solving the problem is with brute force— examine every possible route, compare them all, and pick the best one. This takes a ton of work and computational power— by the time you’re up to ten places to visit, there are more than 360,000 possible ways to do it, more than 80 billion with fifteen places to visit. Impossible. But take the roughly ten thousand ants in a typical colony, set them loose on the eight- feeding- site version, and they’ll come up with something close to the optimal solution out of the 5,040 possibilities in a fraction of the time it would take you to brute- force it, with no ant knowing anything more than the path that it took plus two rules (which we’ll get to). This works so well that computer scientists can solve problems like this with “virtual ants,” making use of what is now known as swarm intelligence."
Great initiative! It is really impressive how much you have accomplished in such a short amount of time and with limited resources. I am definitely going to explore your website further.
I think its ok not to like Dostoyevsky, de gustibus - but you are implying that people read him to feel smart or that they need to put a great amount of effort in reading... great books have an healing effect even when tired and at the end of the day...