Adam Koszek - Personal Website

Agent Glass

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I built Agent Glass.

Beautiful, isn’t it? This baby has three panes: Sidebar with all the stuff you need right away. Click around, don’t be scared. The list of stuff you’re supposed to be looking at is the middle pane: think of it as an index of everything that you went through with AI agents. All your conversations will be listed here. Most of your eye’s time will be on the main pane, which is the content. This is where the transcript of all your AI divagations live.

What I'm Doing Now

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Current Focus

I’m building Konobase, an AI data platform for regulated industries. We help teams in healthcare, finance, and compliance-heavy sectors search, organize, and use sensitive data safely. This is where most of my time goes – product, engineering, and go-to-market.

Outside of Konobase, I work with a small number of founders and companies on technical advisory. I tend to gravitate toward teams solving hard problems in regulated spaces – the kind where getting it wrong has real consequences.

Startup CTO

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Startup CTO

Over the 2019–2025 I’ve maintained some notes on the process of starting https://www.segmed.ai and developments/beliefs that either turned right, or the ones that were completely wrong. This was mostly to see how I’m doing on a tech/biz decision trajectory. The more I looked at it, the more is started to sound like a story.

Two YC friends picked my brain on some business things and how it could fruitfully be converted into the technical aspects, and both said that there should be a book about the CTOing..

How to Pronounce My Name

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sun, 17 Aug 2025 15:00:00 -0700

Adam Ko-shek. That’s it.

Adam - Standard English pronunciation
Koszek - /KO-shek/

My full name is Wojciech Adam Koszek. Wojciech is for folks who knew me before I moved to the US, or Polish folks who can handle a tongue twister: /VOY-chekh/.

About me

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sat, 31 May 2025 15:00:00 -0700

I’m the CEO/Founder of Konobase, an AI data platform for regulated industries. We help teams in healthcare, finance, and compliance-heavy sectors search, organize, and use sensitive data safely.

I’ve spent 25 years building technology, from operating systems to AI products. I’ve raised venture capital, built teams, and navigated FDA and HIPAA constraints in regulated environments. I operate across product, engineering, and go-to-market when the work demands it.

Before Konobase, I was a cofounder/CTO at Segmed, a Y Combinator and StartX company. We built first ever platform for ethical sourcing of medical imaging data, along with HIPAA-compliant, privacy-preserving infrastructure that enabled hundreds of AI, healthcare, and life-science companies obtain FDA 510(k) clearance. Our platform processed billions of medical DICOM images across hospitals and vendors, allowing researchers build compliant AI products.

Contact

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sat, 31 May 2025 15:00:00 -0700

Get in touch. I’m always interested in connecting with makers building interesting technology, or anyone interested in my work.

My email is “adam” at my lastname dot com.

Speaking

I regularly speak at Stanford GSB Stanford Ignite.

Portfolio

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sat, 31 May 2025 15:00:00 -0700

Companies I’ve built, scaled, and advised.

Current

Konobase

Founder & CEO

AI data platform for regulated industries. We help teams in healthcare, finance, and compliance-heavy sectors search, organize, and use sensitive data safely.

Segmed

Cofounder & CTO

Built the first platform for ethical sourcing of medical imaging data. HIPAA-compliant, privacy-preserving infrastructure that enabled hundreds of AI and healthcare companies obtain FDA 510(k) clearance.

Y Combinator W20, StartX, Alchemist Batch 21
Raised $20M from YC, Blumberg Capital, Mighty Capital, iGan Capital, and others
Grew from 2 to 35 people, $0 to $6M ARR
Platform processed billions of DICOM images across hospitals and vendors

Twin Prime → Salesforce

Early Team Member

Software

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sat, 31 May 2025 15:00:00 -0700

111 public repositories on GitHub. Selected projects below.

Products & Platforms

Konobase — AI data platform for regulated industries. Helps teams in healthcare, finance, and compliance-heavy sectors search, organize, and use sensitive data safely.
bsub.io — Batch processing platform for running Docker containers at scale. CLI, REST API, and SDK interfaces. GPU support for ML workloads. Self-hostable for HIPAA/SOC 2 compliance. No cold starts, no timeouts.
Storapo — Unified OCI-compatible artifact registry for Docker images, Helm charts, npm packages, ML models, binaries, and more. Bring-your-own-S3 architecture. Built-in Cosign verification, SBOM generation, and Trivy vulnerability scanning.
GazeSite — AI-powered website review tool that simulates real visitor experiences across demographic profiles. Analyzes clarity, readability, design, and SEO.

Systems & Hardware

emuko — RISC-V system emulator written in Rust with adaptive JIT compilation for ARM64 and x86_64. Boots full Linux with BusyBox userland. Includes differential checker, HTTP daemon API, snapshot/restore, and complete peripheral stack (UART, CLINT, PLIC, SBI, Sv39 MMU). ~15,000 lines of Rust, one external dependency.
akmega — Synthesizable ATmega328P microcontroller core in SystemVerilog with a complete C-to-silicon workflow. Includes a Python golden model for bit-perfect verification, AXI4-Lite memory buses, and full ASIC flow from firmware compilation through GDSII layout generation using OpenLane and Sky130 process technology.
cpu60 — CPU simulator modeling an 8-register processor in 60 lines of C. 160 stars on GitHub.
hardware — Verilog designs from internships at Ericsson and Xilinx. Includes debouncer circuits, rotary encoder implementations, and Xilinx DNA primitive decoders.
libxbf — C library for parsing Xilinx FPGA bitstream (.bit) file headers. 14 stars, 8 forks.

FreeBSD & Kernel Development

Became the youngest FreeBSD committer in 2006.

Writing

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sat, 31 May 2025 15:00:00 -0700

Some of my papers written over the years (also on Google Scholar)

“Generating Synthetic Data for Medical Imaging”

Lennart R. Koetzier, Jie Wu, Domenico Mastrodicasa, Aline Lutz, Matthew Chung, Adam Koszek, Jayanth Pratap, Akshay S. Chaudhari, Pranav Rajpurkar, Matthew P. Lungren, Martin J. Willemink

Paper: Radiology 2024 (DOI), 2024
Journal: Radiology, Volume 312, Issue 3

“Preparing Medical Imaging Data for Machine Learning”

Martin J. Willemink, Wojciech A. Koszek, Cailin Hardell, Jie Wu, Dominik Fleischmann, Hugh Harvey, Les R. Folio, Ronald M. Summers, Daniel L. Rubin, Matthew P. Lungren

Non-Tech Founder Technology Guide

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Fri, 20 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Non-Tech Founder Technology Guide

This book is a sister book to the CTO book. The notes about non-tech communication that didn’t fit into my CTO book will end up here.

Story is that after pitching N VCs and talking hundreds of vendors, suppliers, hospital execs it was becoming very clear that explaining complex technology to non-technical audience will be CTO’s day-to-day.

It also became apparent that work in modern teams is all about finding the right balance of communication between technical and non-technical members. Non-technical members need to be bought in into the tech decisions that may take long time to materialize.

Stashing Specific Files in Git

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sat, 20 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Today I learned how to stash specific files in Git instead of stashing all changes.

The Problem

Sometimes you’re working on multiple changes but only want to stash some of them. The standard git stash command stashes all modified files, which isn’t always what you want.

The Solution

You can use the git stash push command with specific file paths:

git stash push -m "My partial stash" path/to/file1.txt path/to/file2.js

This will only stash the changes to the specified files, leaving other modified files in your working directory.

Creating Custom Hugo Shortcodes

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 15 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Today I learned how to create custom shortcodes in Hugo to make content creation more efficient.

What are Shortcodes?

Shortcodes are simple snippets inside your content files that Hugo will render using predefined templates. They’re a great way to add custom HTML or reusable components without writing raw HTML in your Markdown files.

Creating a Basic Shortcode

To create a shortcode, add an HTML file to the layouts/shortcodes/ directory. For example, to create a “notice” shortcode:

Solution to an ugly cookie law

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Wed, 04 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000

European Union has a law that addressed privacy issues of the Internet users. The law regulates a technology called HTTP Cookies, which is a clunky but necessary way of storing state on user’s computer. There’s quite a bit of a background in here, and I don’t want to diverge the discussion to technical topics too much. To make it short: license plate on your car can be used for both identifying you in front of the protected gate, making sure your car is operational and registered. Each time you come back to the gate, and either a camera or a security guest sees your license plate, you’re permitted to go in. But it can also be used to follow you on a highway and learn where you live. HTTP cookie is that same for the Internet.

Drawing in 30 days

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sat, 22 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Trying to take the first steps in drawing with this book is much easier. I wanted to get more professional lesson and do something about my mindless doodling, and this book was the right purchase.

If you’ve never drawn, you get to do step by step introduction about techniques, supplies and really easy, approachable examples of simple things that will look decent when you try by yourself.

Get it and your results will be improving the more the more you practice.

Don't Kid Yourself About Software Bootcamps

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Fri, 30 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Don’t kid yourself about bootcamps. These intensive trainings last couple of weeks and promise marvels. It’s not a good way to become a software developer. It’s worthwhile experience and a good investment if you want to start, but assuming you can become a “software engineer” or even “software developer” during software bootcamp may end up in a surprise. I write this because I met enough people discouraged by software bootcamps, since they often end up disappointed and drop software work whatsoever. This is bad, so below you have some suggestions about bootcamps.

To actually ship software, add constraints

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Wed, 28 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000

When you build your software, you don’t have the usual constraints which you have at work: you don’t have a deadline, you don’t have specs, you don’t have customers asking for features, no agile plan with stories, sprints, points and tasks. You’re your own boss. You can do whatever you want. For example: you can write your project in a niche programming language maybe 500 people in the world use. And this is why programming is great.

Hackers and Cooks: how building software really feels like

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 26 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000

After a busy day of debugging you went grocery shopping. After starying for eight hours straighs into the iTerm, being in the avocado section felt like a breeze. And then you enter home.

Cooks

You enter the kitchen and it’s a mess. You’re scared of putting your bags full of fresh, organic produce. Germs are everywhere, after all, and you know it. The tabletop is sticky. Hard to be surprised–you can’t really recall when it was last cleaned. Or who did it. For sure it wasn’t you. Not since you started living here.

Great Movies About Design

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 05 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Design is an overloaded word, but we all get it when we see or experience it. For software design and achieving usability the basics of design are indespensible. Understanding why things are placed the certain way and have certain color is important.

Reading about it is great, and I highly encourage you to buy Non-Designers Design Book, but if you prefer to watch something in the moments of relative downtime, below is the list of movies about design.

Which Open Source Projects Should You Contribute To

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Wed, 31 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I don’t remember which audiobook I heard it from, but the author stated we all seek and are directed by four things: status, power, money, and popularity. Working on software is no different: people don’t spend their private time in front of the computer hacking code without a reason.

You must like to get critique from people who read your code, since it improves your skills. After you bring changes and the people like them, it brings all of your “ratios” higher too. Another example is when your projects reach certain level on maturity and you get recognized by other hackers (through GitHub stars) when they like the program you wrote or the tool you’ve hacked. Personally I get a spike of motivation that way. It’s one of the things that keeps me going with my Open Source.

15 Tips on Staying Productive Offline as a Software Engineer

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 22 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Software engineer offline you can be more productive. I argue that being offline actually helps a lot, especially with focus. You may in theory waste your time becuase you’ll reimplement a function, or done things suboptimally, but it’s not that much of a deal. Below I tell you how to give it a try, and I walk you through the tools I use. Why staying offline may help?

No distractions

When you flip ‘Wi-Fi’ off, Hangouts, Slack, HipChat, e-mail notifications, push notifications, iMessage and your other enemies stop to work. Do it regularly and you’ll see its benefits.

What it's like to write software in the hardware industry

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sat, 13 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Joel Spolsky stated that as a software engineer one can have a great workspace experience in the software company. When I first read it, I worked for the hardware company, in fact, and it took me a while to understand what he meant. Let’s say he was 50% right.

What I share with you here is my experience is backed by one year of internship at Xilinx in 2011, followed by three year full-time 2012–2015. I worked for a hardware/software team writing low-level drivers to the OS used for stress-testing of silicon. Such an OS runs on a silicon prototype, and tries to beat your CPU and I/O subsystem to death. This all is done in hope silicon issues will get exposed before the chip hits the fab, which means huge money savings.

Treat Continuous Integration as your virtual user

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sun, 07 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Ninety five percent of professional software engineers use Jenkins as a Continuous Integration. The rest are consumers of Travis-Ci, Circle CI and many other hosted CI platforms. None of these platforms are opinionated. They are just a little smarter replacements of cron, allowing you to simply throw many commands into the flow to build your software. We use these tools in a dump way, I argue, and it wastes the time of customers of our software.

Memoirs of Hadrian

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 01 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This books is meant to be a collection of letters from Hedrian to Marcus Aurelius. Great content and excellent research has been done to actually provide enough details about the insights about Hadrian.

The structure was so-so, since “letters” are way too long, and in general I’d had a feeling that the story isn’t really going anywhere.

The fact that it’s all has been written by someone who actually didn’t live in the same times as Harian is pretty remarkable.

Single Command Principle

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sat, 29 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

You should follow the Single Command Principle of software deployment. A customer takes your software from the repository, looks at the README file and sees a single command. A main entrance to the whole “software”. Stuff is built and starts to just work in five minutes. This saves time and effort.

This command should either run your software with safe defaults, most common configuration or something that shows that the run is successful.

SSH VPN on OSX with SSHuttle in 3 minutes

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sun, 09 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

You will learn how to setup SSH VPN with sshuttle quickly here. SSH VPN people say is “poor man’s” VPN, but I view it as a great tool, since you can’t always spin OpenVPN easily. If you have the SSH keys installed on the server, there’s no need for any other configuration. No certificates, no drama. I’m using OSX for the purposes of this article.

(Photo by Rishabh Varshney via Unsplash)

Who Says Elephants Can't Dance

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 03 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

IBM was not on the top of my list for doing my entrepreneurial studies, and somehow I learned about this book by accident.

Not only was this book great, but it’s also written by Louis Gerstner, who’s an ex-CEO of IBM.

Think of it as a first person shooter, where a main guy (you) is the CEO, and problems are the monsters in a game.

You should take a look at it, if you ever want to do something entrepreneurial, and especially if you’re in business that needs changing.

How software engineer should invest in career growth

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Fri, 31 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post is for people who look for ways to spend money on personal growth, as a software engineer. Previously I covered how much one should spend to growth. Here let’s talk about the best resources you can invest in.

You should seek for ways of saving your money and after-tax earnings.
Before you apply any of the suggestions, remember to ask your school or employer about them. They have a way to bring resources to you, because funds for training and growth are specially allocated in big institutions. Let’s start from the cheapest to the most expensive.

Are you a good Open Source contributor?

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Tue, 28 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Most likely you aren’t a good Open Source contributor. Most people aren’t. Let’s look at it a bit closer. Below you’ll find a scale which will give you the sense of how the community of Open Source is structured. Where do you fall in it?

By community you can understand several things, but to simplify things: think of GitHub. Don’t worry too much GitHub is an actual company. In your head Git and GitHub are synonyms of the Open Source already, because they have the biggest number of software repositories, the biggest number of users, and they provide everything that a modern software project needs. Their community is the most vibrant, and they host the most important OSS projects.

Movies every software engineer should watch

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 13 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This is a live list of movies I enjoyed. They assist me till now. I often think of scenes from some of these titles. They spark my imagination, and bring some smile.

Triumph of the Nerds

Very interesting documentary on Silicon Valley history.

Something Ventured

Silicon Valley is made out of a mix of investors and engineers, and this movie shows this real tight collaboration between the two. It has some computer legends, and I can’t speak highly enough about it.

How to use Ansible Vault with LastPass

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sun, 05 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

There are several competitors for password managers. I use LastPass, because it has an Open Source command line client. This is an officially supported tool, maintained by the LastPass itself. I haven’t audited the code; I have just looked at several .c files, and it seamed decent. Code has been around since 2014, so in the last three years I suspect both good and bad guys had a chance to find issues.

The Outsiders: Eight Unconventional CEOs and Their Radically Rational Blueprint for Success

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Fri, 03 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This book is an excellent take on the strategies of great CEOs. I don’t remember how I learned about it, but I believe it was The Snowball.

Most of people from this book were fairly unconventional, and against the per-book approach of management.

Great part of the book is a breakdown of capital allocation and capital preservation strategies.

Author did an excellent role in researching leaders who previously haven’t been covered in the literature. For example, the Henry Singleton of Teledyne is pretty mysterious, but his results were pretty impressive.

Everybody Writes

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Wed, 01 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Didn’t remember this book whatsoever after several weeks after reading it.

What's the most expensive stage of software engineering?

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Tue, 28 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

(Photo by Yatesndu Agus Wismoyo via Unsplash)

Imagine we’re starting a software project together this year. It will run in production, and serve a large amount of live customer traffic. Its lifespan may look like this:

If this cycle of maintenance is long enough, it can overweight the cost of all previous stages. I do have projects which are considered “finished”: all the features are there, and as much as you can’t make a hammer any better, neither can I any of these projects. But for the most part, the software story is a little different: it’ll always be a recipe, but the kitchen, ingredients, pans or people will change over time. These adjustments cost money.

Shoe Dog: A memoir by the creator of Nike

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Fri, 24 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Making pull requests that merge

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sat, 18 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

The role of the software architect is to reject bad code, push back on unnecessary features and prevent the project from accumulating cruft. I use the term “software architect” here to match the professional environment, but it can apply to any independent software developer, including Open Source software engineers writing projects they love and talk about. When you make a change to the software source code, you will need to pass a judgement of a software architect. To bring your code into the project upstream, there are two angles you’ll be evaluated from: technical and social.

Ruby Cookbook

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Fri, 17 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Clean Code

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 13 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This book is a classic for books about writing software, but in general I found it underwhelming. Java code is verbose by default, with all its public, static, protected even refactored, you end up with a similar level of complexity. That’s the take I had from that book: several examples were indeed refactored and the end code was shown, but I had “meh” feeling about whether it really helped the program readability.

Learn programming: self study guide

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 13 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

The advice you will get here is a true and honest take on how I believe you should start programming computers, and how you can self-educate yourself in a programming craft. I know how to do it because I went through this process by myself and I know exactly where the pain points are. I don’t talk about any specific books, as other people have done it already. I only talk about methodology and mental side of studying.

How much software engineer should invest in career growth

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 06 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Software engineers can start generating income pretty early on. You don’t need permission from anyone, no certificates, no paperwork, no examination. If you have your debts paid off, this is the moment when you should think of yourself as a single-person company. Why? It’s not because I want you to go and become a freelancer and be on your own, but becuase it’s easier to understand how to make decent financial decisions that way. Let’s talk about this. For the purposes of our discussion let’s assume that if your name is David Roberts, the name of your company is “David Roberts LLC”. Write it down, if it helps you: “David Roberts, CEO of David Roberts LLC”. You’re in a company mindset now. We can understand what it really means now.

The Art of Plain Talk

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Fri, 03 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Probably one of the best books on language, writing and readability in general. It’s very good take on phrasing readable sentences, keeping language clear and concise.

The key take away were the results of the readability studies Flesch did in early XXIth century. He found certain relationships with age and education and its impact on text readability.

Before I read this, I didn’t know about the algorithms for readability. The formulas in the book seemed a little abstract, yet there’s something appealing at having a single score of your written text. Microsoft Word has Flesch’s algorithm embedded.

Why you should start programming on UNIX

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sat, 28 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

It’s simpler than anything else around.

I know. It’s counterintuitive. All the nice tools and integrated environments for writing code looks slick. You may even see other people using them in the train to work.

You look over their shoulder and it doesn’t look that hard.

But it is.

So stay with me hear and listen. The idea might be counterintuitive, but if you go with it, I think you’ll learn programming faster and you’ll be a better engineer at the end, since you’ll do more things by yourself.

Scientific Advertising

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Fri, 27 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

David Ogilvy and many other authors of copy-written ads mentioned Claude C. Hopkins was their hero, and that his book is a mandatory reading. You should at least look at it, if you want to get a full experience for your advertising and marketing education.

The myths of advertising being “creative” are debunked here. The advertising from a purely scientific format is shown. Ads are treated like salesperson, and the same demands are expected out of them. Bringing money to the table, and making a sale is what he talked about all the time.

King of Madison Avenue

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 23 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

If you want to make software products, you must know design. Even when I worked for the hardware company, my software was used by humans, and they object if what you make sucks. I’ve made a script used by many engineers for result reporting. And the output was shared in the web, PDF and printed form. For stuff like this you must know design, otherwise you’ll fail miserably.

This is one of the few books for hackers to introduce you to design step by step. The amount of unnecessary fluff is minimal. It uses easy language, without many scientific details which you’d forget anyway.

The best OSX file manager

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Wed, 18 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Even if you don’t like Windows, some tools there are great. One of them is WinAmp, probably the best audio player around. (do you know a replacement for OSX? Let me know!)

Another is Total Commander–the 2 pane file commander. Total Commander can do anything you can think of for file management. Its UI was like Norton Commander’s: the “blue background” file manager for DOS.

You miss a lot if you don’t use these tools, since they’re huge time savers. There isn’t a similar functionality built in the OSX, so you’ll have to do your homework. You can use Finder, of course, and I do like Finder and its preview feature. Also the the embedded image editor is very useful. However for shuffling files Finder is terrible. To move one file from one directory to another, you must open two windows. Or you must open tabs. Selecting files is terrible. I can’t count how many times I’ve selected 20 images and they all were accidently opened. Or you select many files and want to move them to the directory on the very bottom of the current screen. Good luck with that. For file-system management, Finder sucks. You must admit it.

Non-designers design book

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Tue, 17 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This is a biography of David Ogilvy of Ogilvy and Mather.

You will get a behind the scenes look at the advertising agency and business, but you won’t get much of advises about advertising of how to write a good body copy.

For this, look at other books by the same author.

I decided to read this book, since I was intrigued by Ogilvy, since it appears he did his homework on measuring the efficiency of ads like no one else, and I wanted to understand how much of what I see in the Internet is a well-measured manipulation, researched or a random spam.

Reading 101 for software engineers

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Tue, 17 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I would argue that without reading, you’re wasting a lot of time. “Good people borrow, and great steal”. I know few software engineers, who don’t read and yet still write amazing software. But there are very few of them. I bet you’re not one of them, actually. And most of their time, they do waste some time too. Very few of us solve unique problems. You’re probably not the lucky guy either.

Ogilvy on Advertising

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Fri, 13 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

So you have built something and you want to sell it. Direct approach probably works best, and you can blast the information about your product to the potential prospects through the e-mail. But you don’t know how?

You’ve never done it, right? You just keep making websites and software, and you’re good at it, but somehow your stuff isn’t gaining traction?

Do you make it a short e-mail, with a simple image on top? Or a long one, explaining everything step-by-step?

256 bloghacks

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sat, 07 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

You created a blog, but it sucks? It has beautiful minimized HTML, great JavaScript and CSS and renders flawlessly on iOS 6. The problem is that nobody but you is accessing your blog?

Exactly.

I made this blog in 2012, but didn’t really think about it much. I restarted the efforts in 2015 and 2016, but had moderate success (hundreds visitors “spiking” when I published something, and then traffic dying out after 2 days). That’s the moment in publishing online where you think: “Really, that’s all I get by publishing stuff to millions of people?”

That's why you haven't accomplished enough in 2016

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 02 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

When you make a plan to accomplish goals, most of the time you don’t do it very well. Maybe it’s the book you wanted to read, the podcasts you wanted to listen, or maybe finally wrapping up the pet project of yours.

First of all typically you have too many goals. Another problem is that they’re not very precise. Not very measurable. You don’t know how to even start. You never start and thus you fail. Maybe even you’re slightly depressed or upset, since not finishing what you’ve plan kind of sucks.

Design for hackers

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sun, 01 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This book would be fine if you aren’t impatient.

Contrary to what one could think, seeing the title, it’s less targeted towards hackers.

I’d expect that it’s directed towards technical people, who may not be interested in the whole story and knowledge of the art history.

So I was disappointed. So will you.

Much better is the “Non-designers design book”. Why? It’s shorter and more to the point, if you want to build products, and you want to get fast 101 on design.

The Little Book of Common Sense Investing

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Tue, 13 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Building an Open Source iOS app: lessons learned

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 12 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Below you can find an abstract and materials for the talk I gave at the Silicon Valley Mobile Developers and Designers Meetup at Hacker Dojo, Santa Clara, Dec 12th, 2016.

Slides

Slideshare slides.

Building an Open Source iOS app: lessons learned from Wojciech Koszek

For easy download, go to GitHub link below.

Abstract

In this talk I’m going to talk about lessons learned from building Sensorama https://www.sensorama.org, an Open Source sensor platform for data science. The main theme of the talk will be Open Source: what is great about it, what is bad and how you must become a part of the Open Source community to really move quickly and benefit from it. For this project, I did both the code and the design, so you’ll have a chance to see how solo-developer deals with time/feature constraints, which tools I’ve used and what my approach towards development in this mode is. In other words: I’ll tell you what I did to stay sane. If the iOS development were a walk in a dark city park, this talk may turn out to be your flashlight. If you like it, star it at GitHub: https://github.com/wkoszek/sensorama-ios

Failure of my one post per week goal

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Wed, 02 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000

I started to appreciate bloggers and YouTubers this year. We’ve got many, many people pushing great content into the Internet for free, and let me tell you: I’m not one of them.

After understanding that writing on a regular basis is important, I’ve tried to do one blog a week.

One blog a week. Really. This isn’t that much if you think about it. I believed that it’d be around 30 minutes of writing and maybe several more on proofreading and publishing, but it’s official – I’ve failed.

White Coat Investor

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Fri, 05 Aug 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Would you like to get better with the personal finance?

Who wouldn’t right?

You’re not alone, if you still think that some things in your wallet happen by accident. And often you forget and later are surprised.

Many of us are like this, and often getting a good advise of how to change this stage of things is challenging.

This book could be a remedy. Originally targeted towards doctors, I’ve found it very useful as an engineer. Just smart part of this book is directed towards medical procession. Most of it is universal.

Good to Great

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Wed, 27 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Dealing with large jobs on Travis-CI

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 25 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000

I’m releasing all my projects through continuous integration, so I end up working with Travis-CI a lot. Travis provides a corresponding diagnostic page for each project I have linked to it from GitHub. For example one of my GitHub projects is here and its Travis-CI subpage would be here. If you look at the link format, you’ll understand what I mean. In there you can see what the output of your job was. Most of the jobs are fairly simple and finish within short period of time. For these jobs debugging the build steps is easy: just look at the console output and see what’s wrong. It’s what I do 95% of time. Below I give hints on how to handle 5% of other cases.

Soft Skills: The software developer's life manual

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 18 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000

What I learned from connecting 60 projects to CI system

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 11 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Several months ago I started to wonder what makes me check out software sitting at GitHub and try it out. Some projects I was more willing to work with, and some I simply skipped without thinking about it much. It seemed like a habit which I’ve developed over the years. But why do I have this feeling of carelessly ignoring some projects over another?

The characteristics of projects I’m drawn into are pretty simple: good, clear documentation, good top-level directory structure, presence of some “dotfiles” and … green badge, signalizing Continuous Integration (CI) system is actually verifying this software is at least building fine.

What Docker really is

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 27 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

It felt strange when Docker first came out, since I couldn’t really understand what it is. It is an interesting feeling when people market and brand a new technology in a way which makes it obscure and hard to understand. So below you have my explanation of Docker, the way I would like to see it couple of months ago.

Docker in one paragraph

Docker is a manager for isolated buckets of software called containers. I gives you a way to say: “My software is based on Ubuntu; it must have these 4 packages installed, and these 5 commands must be executed to make it run continually”. These steps will be done at “build” time, during which your ~1GB image will be created. From this image containers with your software can be started on many OSes.

Procrastination: Why You Do It, What to Do About It Now

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Wed, 15 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

747

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sat, 04 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

An amazing insight into the building of the biggest passenger plane of that time. This book does a good job at explaining what building complex engineering projects are all about. One of the phrases that stuck with me was that the plane is designed so that all the parts can be serviceable and testable, and whole which are too deeply buried inside of the structure of the plane must last 20 years.

Launch It

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Wed, 18 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Use as few tools as possible

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 16 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Choosing a technology stack is an essential part of building and engineering your software product. This is the matter you’ll be stuck in forever. Unless you build a 2-line program it’s important to make good decisions at this stage.

I see a lot of “technical fashion” in the computer world. People come up with new and different solutions to the same problems, depending on things like programming language or a method itself. And then they start encompassing their new creations into new products. Thus we see new wave of computer languages, tools and transpilers which essentially do the same, but in a different way.

How to ask questions on Stack Overflow?

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 18 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This year I want to contribute to Stack Overflow. I’ve been using this site for years, but have never answered any questions, rated answers or posted replies. I want to change this.

I went ahead and made myself several tags with topics I’m good at. And as a break from work, I try to answer questions. There is a lot of good questions, but most of them are bad. People make it hard to help themselves. They either give a lot of data, but don’t formulate the problem, or state the problem, but give no information about their setup, environment and conditions. Stack Overflow is no different than any other technical forum. Mailing lists and GitHub Issues are another examples. But you must communicate clearly to really benefit from them.

Don't document. Automate!

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 11 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

When I go to an article or a GitHub page it sometimes amazes me how good stuff people produce. I’m building an sensor platform recently, and a lot of problems I solve by using software others wrote and made it free. This is great. But there’s one pattern which I need to criticize: people write way to much.

What do I mean by that?

The normal flow of getting software to work is typing a series of steps. For example it may require typing 10 commands in the command line. And these commands for ninety five percent of people will likely be the same. For the rest 10% they’ll be slightly customized, but not much. Nothing that couldn’t be achieved with 10-line shell script consuming 1-2 parameters.

Dropbox on iOS is disappointing

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 04 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Dropbox popularized the idea of cloud storage. They were the first widely used product which normal people like my mother could understand. On OSX Dropbox is integrated very well with the OS. In fact, you can see Dropbox as a folder and basically forget that the files which you save locally will be transmitted on the server in the background.

On a daily basis I use Google Drive, but when I got an iPad, I thought it’d be good to keep Dropbox as my iPad backing store, so that I don’t get distracted with my normal stuff. I intended to keep PDFs, books and other documents in Dropbox so that I could use my iPad for productive work.

I've got an iPad Pro yesterday

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 21 Mar 2016 00:00:00 +0000

When iPad Pro came out, I got really excited. The price was fairly high, but this model seemed to include all features I always wanted from a tablet.

My priorities when making a tablet purchase:

big, high resolution screen. Should mean no more eyeballing of A4/American Letter size documents on small screen with scaled down fonts; also more trees saved on printing down things I’d only read once.
decent pencil for drawing
a lot of memory for podcasts, trainings and audiobooks

I got iPad Pro. It is my first tablet ever. Up until this point I felt like buying a tablet would be a total waste of money, since the features from the list are pretty essential for my usual workflow.

On writing well

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Fri, 15 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This book is similar in nature to other guides, but it’s fairly packed. It’s a very useful little title that I picked up, since as a non-native speaker, you naturally “miss” things other people may find obvious.

This is one of the top bestsellers on books about writing.

Zinsser went though the written English language in points and he explained how to remove clutter, simplify your English and bump up your writing. It’s the first book where I understood that the passive voice weakens your expression.

How to store SSH passphrases in LastPass

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 07 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Passwords are a terrible authentication mechanism. Even though this mechanism exists in computer systems for years, frankly there aren’t too many solutions to address the password problem. If you’ve dealt with more than three different APIs I bet you must have committed confidential data to GitHub at least once. SSH with its keys isn’t any better, and is used in more critical places.

Below I attempt to address the SSH passphrase problem. My setup is based on LastPass. LastPass stores a binary bundle with all your passwords in the cloud. Bundle is fetched on your machine, and you decrypt it with a master password. During decrypting phone-based 2-factor authentication is used for increased security. If your master password is weak, you’re baked. Upon decryption you have an access to all your passwords, including SSH passphrases. The script automates the management of ssh-agent and key adding.

How I use transparency during development

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Wed, 02 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

The 13” MacBook Air isn’t a perfect development environment, yet I still need to do some work done outside of the house. I’ve been experimenting around and that’s what I’ve came up with:

In the background you have a Web browser with middleman-livereload. Each time I make a small source code change in Vim and save a file, the live-reload updates the site in the background. We could call it “real-time”. The advantage of this method is that you can use it without any special configuration: default Terminal in MacOSX or Xterm client being able to display transparency will work. And you must have some environment for web development where Livereload works. Transparency I have isn’t shown percentage-wise, but it’s set to around ⅓:

Quiz: portability of “find” command

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sun, 29 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

On MacOSX:

wk:/w/repos/dockerfiles&> find wkoszek -type d -depth 1
wkoszek/base
wkoszek/nginx

On Linux you get:

find: warning: you have specified the -depth option after a non-option
argument -type, but options are not positional (-depth affects tests
specified before it as well as those specified after it). Please specify
options before other arguments.

Hint: compare manual pages of both commands.

Quiz: do you know offhand what’s the correct fix?

The Willpower Instinct

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Fri, 27 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

My GitHub Wishlist: Consolidate Request

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 23 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

If you develop any sort of software nowadays sooner or later you’ll end up on GitHub. On one side a business, on the other: great part of the Open Source world. I’d claim that GitHub was an integral part of the distributed software development revolution. For me, GitHub is the first source of contact if I want to see who already wrote software bits I need for my next project.

Git and GitHub dominate today, since they’re basically so much better than anything else. When I started to work on software, most of the projects used CVS or Subversion, and while they had some pros (an ability to fetch only some project’s directories) the cons were many. Nowadays everybody is migrating to Git or Mercurial, and old services such as SourceForge or Google Code are becoming more of a ghost sites (Google de-featured Google Code already).

The Phoenix Project

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Tue, 17 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Computer History from Giants Themselves

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 16 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

I was an idol driven kid and I’ve always had somebody I admired when growing up. From the earliest recollections I could trace back in my memory the very first person was probably my grandfather, the master tailor. And through him I got to know MacGyver. I was allowed to watch MacGyver, since my grandfather believed it would teach me creativity and also because I loved pocket knifes. Till this day each time you say something bad about MacGyver, you’ll have an enemy in me, since it was such an integral part of my growing up and becoming creative. Same applies to John Hannibal Smith and probably Dr Emmet Brown. The older I got, the more my idols shifted from the fictional characters to real-world people, and this stayed with me till my adult life.

The Everything Store

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Fri, 13 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Tue, 03 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

How to use nginx on Travis (or other) CI system

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sun, 01 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Travis Ci is one of the most essential tools for my projects, since it takes a burden of maintaining Jenkins away of me. I try to use Travis automation for every boring activity, and having it run after each source code change to do some basic tests saves me a lot of time.

Making things work in Travis is typically straightforward, but there are cases where a special configuration needs to be applied, since the new Travis is based on the container-based architecture. This poses some requirements: no root access and no sudo functionality for your setup scripts. Some software doesn’t like that.

Subtle difference between FreeBSD, MacOSX and Linux printf

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Wed, 28 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

I’m working on polishing my mini_printf implementation and making a final, verified and documented code release, and the thing I made work in the past and something that stopped working when I moved to MacOSX was a randomized stress-test.

https://github.com/wkoszek/mini_printf

It’s pretty neat: it uses its own PRNG generator to achieve repeatability and uses its numbers to construct randomized format strings which are then played against OSes printf() and my mini_printf() API. Both versions are later compared. I exposed a lot of bugs in mini_printf that way, of which all have been fixed.

Miles

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sat, 24 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

On Writing

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Wed, 21 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Audiobook format of “On writing” was excellent. King read it himself. This is what I like about audiobook: they make the form be rich and more colorful by adding this another dimension. This might be one of the few positions where I can recommend the audiobook over a paper book.

First of all books are great. I believe you’ll have the same while reading or listening to King.

There’s a great part about writing as compared to telepathy. This was my favorite moment in a book. Another one was King’s commentary on his own accident.

The Art of Learning

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Thu, 15 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

It’s at least two years now that I’ve listened to it, but I I still remember good stuff from this book. Like imersing yourself with things you study about and making sure you keep recalling/using them often. You’ll be a better learner after reading this book for sure. This comes from a person who mastered more than one field and carefully gathered notes on what it meant and how he did it.

Delivering happiness

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 12 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Top 3 bugs I make in shell scripts

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 12 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Most people involved in software rarely talk about bugs. Perhaps it’s because a lot of software designers are striving for perfection, and aren’t willing to talk about the times when the machine conquered them. We all create software bugs, so let’s break the silence. Below are my top three bugs which occur while writing shell scripts.

Order of redirection

Let’s take an example script which generates “STDOUT” on standard output and “STDERR” on standard error.

Pastebin adds DOS new-line separators at the end snippets

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 05 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Over the weekend I was finally starting to get my head wrapped around automated backups on my Synology DS214. This was supposed to be a ten minute project which of course extended due to some trivial problems along the way. For example: I needed a Python script for fetching data from the Internet over HTTPS so I made this for myself:

#!/usr/bin/env python
import urllib2, sys
urlstr = sys.argv[1]
fname = urlstr.split('/')[-1]
response = urllib2.urlopen(urlstr)
f = open(fname, "w")
f.write(response.read())
f.close()
print "written " + fname

And I pasted it to PasteBin:

wget in 9 lines of Python For Hostile Environments

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sun, 04 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

HTTPS seems to be everywhere these days, including GitHub. It’s great to see the security of the Web improved, but sometimes this comes at a cost. Recently I wanted to actually fetch and test my own repository for bootstrapping my storage box from Synology:

https://github.com/wkoszek/synology

The DS214play model which I have comes with the wget program without HTTPS, so doing a command line bootstrapping is difficult. This is one of this weird chicken-and-egg problems we sometimes experience, and to test my software releases published on GitHub, I wrote this simple thing, which lets me fetch the release and do further bootstrapping and testing:

Daily Rituals

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sat, 03 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Do You Have a Favorite Shell Trick?

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 28 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000

The very first scripting programming language I learned was Perl. It was circa 2000; Python wasn’t that popular back then, and my choice leaned towards Perl since I could get a decent books about it in Polish. I remember squeezing $20 and getting something that seemed like the thickest book ever.

Several years later I came back to Perl because Xilinx was using it too, and since then I’ve had the chance to come back and polish some of my Perl chops. We had a very nice build system written in Perl which let you check out files selectively. You would check out a file to a clean directory, hit “build”, and it’d build a project for you from vanilla sources. Then you’d check out a file you wanted to modify and keep hacking on it. Next you’d hit “build” again, but this time the system would use the modified file instead of the plain file from the repository. All the junk files from C and Verilog compiler would be put in the obj/ directory for you, so you never had to see them. I liked it, since my workspace was really neat and tidy (two to three source code files plus some log files).

Why it's not about self-driving

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Wed, 23 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000

In “How to be Rich” Jean Paul Getty expressed his excitement about enormous advances in science and technology at the beginning of the 20th century. The 21st century seemed to start in an equally exciting way, for example the self-driving car is attracting a great deal of attention lately. When I was about 14 years old a friend of mine told me that if KITT had existed, she’d have bought one. I wasn’t surprised - every kid in my neighborhood wanted KITT and everybody wanted to be Hasselhoff. Moving to the US meant dealing with everything supersized; the smallest car at the airport car rental was bigger than anything I’d ever driven. I really wanted a CarOS: a software featuring a button which would get me from A to B with no hassle. I promised myself that when a self-driving vehicle like this becomes available, I would become an early adopter as soon as my wallet would let me.

The Total Recall

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Tue, 15 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Facebook Paper and Copyright screens

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Tue, 08 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000

In the process of working on Sensorama I wanted to get inspired by a well designed modern mobile app. Figuring out the libraries and technologies people use in well designed products is often a good way to go. Even Apple uses existing products as a base for their next products. But how to find out more about software internals?

Legal pages are those boring documents that none of us ever usually reads. But they are also a great source of engineering information. As makers of software, due to legal and copyright issues, we need to give credits to authors of the libraries we use, as well as inform users about potential risks. And no - you can’t just use the copy & paste function, obfuscate it with your own variable names, reformat tabs to spaces and shift a few lines here and there. Technically you’re supposed to credit people for their work. Basically: help people who have written free code to put their names out there in the wild so that now and then they might land some consulting gigs in exchange for free (as in “free beer”) tools.

Facebook Paper and Copyright screens

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Tue, 08 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Programming Ruby, The Pragmatic Programmer's Guide

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Tue, 08 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Really good book which I’ve picked up after my exposure to Teach yourself Ruby in 21 days

The accompanying the book is the archive of 1600+ examples in the source code form, which I’ve written about here:

https://www.koszek.com/blog/2015/09/01/the-single-biggest-collection-of-ruby-scripts/

Worth to note: 50% of this book is API reference. Initially I didn’t like that, but now I feel like it’d be a good opportunity to go and create some Anki sets from this reference for further revising.

Mind for Numbers

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 07 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000

(Probably) the single biggest collection of Ruby scripts

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Tue, 01 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Quickstart

https://github.com/wkoszek/book-programming-ruby

Explanation

To evaluate the feasibility of different Ruby interpreters I wanted to investigate how any of Ruby 1.8, 1.9, 2.x and Rubinius will deal with subsets of scripts fed to them. I did it because I’ve noticed regressions with Rubinius in the past, and I wanted to understand whether this situation is similar for a larger code base and basically how serious these issues are.

On the separate now, for learning Ruby I used couple of books, and one of them was:

How do you evaluate new technologies?

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Wed, 26 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000

“How do I get started with X” is probably one of the most frequently asked questions on technical forums. With 2.8 billion results from Google, somehow technical “AWS” manages to top the search results page:

As a software crowd, we all start to use new technologies at some point. While many technologies are fairly self-explanatory (having no “democratize” or “disruptive” in their name), many of them aren’t, or simply have no feature that distinguishes them from other available options. How do you select new components for your newest product?

I wish Ruby and Python stopped changing so much

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 17 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000

In my article on Go, I expressed my frustration on trying to make gdrive work in no time. Unfortunately, I failed to do so in a predicted time back then. Many users commented on wrong title and problems with the content. While I still believe tools that just don’t work are likely to drive users away, I must say that one of the reader’s comments on my article expressed a point of view, which I can identify with:

Dot.Bomb: My Days and Nights at an Internet Goliath

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sat, 15 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Non-continuous innovation = dangerous or “Amazon Ad Platform Cleanups”

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 10 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000

I received an email from Amazon two months ago, but I didn’t really pay attention to it,letting it stew in my mailbox for a while, until I visited the reading section of my website in the hope of referring to the book I read a while ago, and all I saw instead of a nice picture was this:

The cause is good, but the place is bad. So I went back and I dug up the email:

Command Line Interface to GoDaddy.com

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 03 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000

For quite some time now I’ve been a user of GoDaddy. I remember my frustration with the Polish registrar holding some of my .pl domains: their user interface was terrible, since after logging to your account all you could see was an advertisement:

The website with an ad always loaded very quickly. Then you had to switch to “Control Panel”, which was always very slow. I could complain more about the amount of time I have spent trying to do basic things there, but I’ll leave it as a topic for my usability website.

Critical Chain

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 03 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Nothing else than a description. At some point point I simply stopped paying attention, since it appeared to me that a lot of the knowledge in here was already in The Goal

Optimize for the Developer’s Time, Not the Machine’s

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Tue, 28 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000

It is sometimes easy to forget how computer engineers in the early days struggled just to make things work. In ’70s and ’80s, computing resources like memory were scarce; CPUs were slow, and disk space was limited. There was little or no networking, and communication with the computer was primitive. Heck, even Norton Commander on a 12” was suboptimal. Right now, I could probably achieve this:

And do it in a single Terminal window, which would make ’70s engineers’ eyeballs go red with jealousy. Have you ever wondered what the world was like without Vim or Emacs? Yet these are fairly recent accomplishments. To summarize: It’s easy to forget all these things and keep asking questions such as why are Microsoft Office file formats so complicated, unless you understand the heritage of certain decisions and computers in general.

From Zero To One

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Fri, 24 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Why the Go Language Won't Be Successful

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Wed, 22 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Since I wrote this post two years ago, I changed my mind: Go is OK.

The other day I stumbled upon a Google Drive command line client. It’s a software project written in the Go language. It lets you access Google Drive from the command line. I felt it was a great project, and I wanted to give it a shot, so I started reading. Unfortunately, the program is distributed in binary form, and given several problems that GitHub has had over the past 2 years or so, I’d rather not run binaries from GitHub on my machine. Makes sense, right?

Source Code from "Programmer Guide to NCurses" by Dan Gookin

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Wed, 08 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Even though I’ve never read Gookin’s book, I’ve noticed that his website tarball with C sources is quite useful, as it contains small self-contained programs. To the sources I’ve added a makefile to make build automated and I’ve fixed programs which weren’t compiling.

Dependencies

For MacOSX I didn’t need anything. For Ubuntu you’ll probably have to type:

apt-get install libncurses5-dev libncurses5

How to build?

Fetch the source, enter its folder and type make:

How the best companies do Continuous Integration

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 29 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Nothing but the successful result of compilation delivers this unique feeling of accomplishment. There are multiple stages of project’s success, yet each feedback on a positive program build is exciting, since it is just one step from actual program execution–the ultimate goal.

Yet when done too frequently, building becomes a problem. Especially when projects grow, you become dependent on many other libraries. Maybe even whole projects. Building simple application nowadays requires inclusion of many 3rd party modules, and this process is not always easy. And this is how building becomes problematic, since it starts to be slow and boring. Feedback loop, which usually is really tight for small programs becomes really long and slow; in the process you start getting distracted, and cheat yourself that you can multitask, but you really can’t.

The Hard Thing About Hard Things

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Thu, 25 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

If you were present somewhere close to Bay Area circa 2014–2015, and you’ve asked about some resources for entrepreneurs and people interested in startups, there are several well-known classics which are considered a Mekka of startup knowledge. Today I’m proud to announce that by audio bookshelf has been extended by 1 important resource and I feel soon it’ll become a classic referred to by many individuals.

Horowitz’s “The Hard Thing About Hard Things” is written in a pretty interesting style. Just like one of the things which you may not know about Steve Vai is that he’s a bee-keeper, you may not know is that Ben Horowitz seems to be be a fan of certain style of music. Which one? Get to learn it from the book. Prelude to each chapter consists of quotations from several artists. I may not be a big fan of any of them, but I’m a big fan of all drummers which these people hire for live tours. Consider it a quiz!

Fixing Middleman-spellcheck

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sat, 20 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Sometimes when you make a change to the software, it is interesting to predict how long will such change take. Fixing Middleman-spellcheck was initially only about letting myself to select words which I would consider correct and do it from within the front-matter of each Middleman’s article files. It ended up taking more than I anticipated, and below is short description on what went wrong.

Middleman plugin infrastructure lets one to run a filter on several stages of the build process, and Middleman-spellcheck runs at the end, once all files are converted from .md to .html files.

Twenty-one Dog Years: Doing Time at Amazon.com

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sun, 14 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Even though that books on whining aren’t among ones which I like the most, I must say that Daisey’s title surprised me greatly. This is a very unique book, both in a style and the content. Author, unlike many ones which I’ve got to know, with a great distance to himself explains how it felt to be a part of early days of Amazon. Moving from customer service through the steps of organizational ladder he landed in departments which made no sense back then.

Organized mind

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Wed, 20 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Sometimes it makes me think how much information XXI century human being can intake with intellectual hiccup. It’s a fairly known fact that as we move forward with medicine, science and human knowledge in general nowadays, the knowledge of past generations starts to be available at our fingertips.

My detour to “Organized Mind” was in hope to figure out how other people deal with information overload in modern times. I struggle with a amount of data you can intake from interviews, audiobooks and podcasts. Other people I know struggle from task and priority management. When I think about this, one can open Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn pages on a 27-inch screen and with several screen scroll you can spot, analyze, classify and consume content (let’s skip the usefulness or the value derived from these sources) and act upon it. How to apply the same methods to all information which flows in your direction? Is there a system?

Just My Type

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 18 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000

We’re all surrounded by text. Be it an electronic version or a good and old-school paper hardcover book, the thing that makes books readable are fonts.

I don’t exactly remember how I start to pay attention to how letters in books are shaped, but it was pretty early on. My English teacher in a 2nd grade of primary school exposed me to British and American English books, and I’ve noticed significant different in letter shapes, as their block letters were not alike script taught in Polish school.

Made it stick

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Fri, 24 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Accelerating learning should probably be my logical step before I started to read and listen to (audio) books, yet I came to this topic quite late. During one of the trips back home in KQED I’ve listened to a great podcast entitled: “Science of Smart” where a research of Roedriger was mentioned.

General message out of this book is that studying-by-repeating and cramming for exams are the most common “learning” techniques applied by students of high-school and universities. Yet the research proves that it’s testing and quizing that actually helps us retain the knowledge and actually master it.

The Innovators

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Thu, 23 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Probably the most comprehensive study on the history and current state of computing and innovation. From Ada Byron to Bill Gates. From mechanical computers, through tubes to the transistor. Explained is the history of modern computing.

Chapter 3 reminded me that in the early days people building computers didn’t recognize the domain of programming at all. It’s quite fascinating to think that I graduated from a domain which 50 years earlier wasn’t even recognized. In the old days people building computers would write programs, and due to the nature of their programming (low-level programming with 0 abstraction of hardware interfaces) it’s hard to be surprise by that state of things.

In the Plex

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 05 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000

In The Plex is a very detailed explanation of the insides of Google.

Few big corporations established enough of a cultures and values to actually drive talented employees towards them, and Google is unquestionably one of them. Structured after a college dorm Google is the place where most talented college graduates end up

Search engine started at Stanford, and sponsored by two mentors of Silicon Valley: Andy Bechtolsheim and David Cheriton moved from being built with cheap computers in a Beowulf cluster to being a “cloud”, still built with commodity hardware, but with many, many improvements from the software side to make the search reliable.

The Founder's Dilemmas

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Tue, 30 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This book was on my TODO for quite a while, as I was in the search for a some answers related to problems founders of startups and individual projects face.

Have you ever had an idea and wanted to collect a team of friends and execute them? If so, you’ll know what these problems might be.

The feel of the book is similar to the Millionaire’s Mind, as the author relates to his broad study and statistical evidence across a lot of startups. The issue is that only small number of these startups are used for the main thread of a discussion.

Picture This: How Pictures Work

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sat, 27 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This little great book is a perfect night read: little words. If present, they’re very condensed, filled only with very rich content. But words is not why this book is great: its illustrative graphics helps you understand why pictures work how they work. And why.

Book is made up from a story, which starts with the page number one and builds till the very last page. Each page contains a sample image with short explanation and gives the reader a moment to look at the image and figure out how it feels.

Teach yourself Ruby in 21 days

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 24 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This is a very nice, slick, little book with a fair amount of background in Ruby to actually remind/teach one how to work with this language.

Chapter subdivision is done surprisingly well. I assume that if you’ve programmed in the other scripting languages such as Perl of Python, you should be able to squeeze book’s ``Day’’ in a corporate’s date.

Otherwise: the measurement is probably pretty accurate.

The exercises are interesting, unlike in some other books. Doing the exercises made me feel like I’m actually accomplishing something practical, and not yet another:

The Idea Factory

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Tue, 04 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000

The Power of Twitter

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sun, 19 Oct 2014 00:00:00 +0000

For some time now I was promising myself that I’d try to put social media under my control, since thanks to many website I use on a daily basis I realized communication is a good thing. Twitter usage has been hard to understand to myself, as I came from a UNIX culture of hardcore engineers no interested in non-Terminal, non-black-and-white things.

How to read a book?

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 13 Oct 2014 00:00:00 +0000

A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Wed, 24 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Linchpin

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Wed, 17 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Accelerated learning techniques

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Wed, 03 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This little and interesting book touches topics such as paraphrasing newly read material, together with hints on how to stay focused.

There was a nice pearl about how to become a very literate person. Recipe was:

1 book
1 poem
1 short story

I suspect I’ll have to come up with a CS equivalent of this list.

Mind mapping was mentioned. Before I knew how it is called I was using it, for things which I were to do right the next day. Being in bed and far away from a pen, I tried to throw a pillow in the middle of a room while thinking about specific problem/task. The next day right after waking up I questioned the location of the pillow and immediately recalled what I was thinking the previous night.

Essential: Essays by The Minimalists

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Thu, 28 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Are you smart enough to work at Google?

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Thu, 21 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0000

One Minute Millionaire

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Tue, 12 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Home Buying For Dummies

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Wed, 02 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This is a nice-to-have 101 on real-estate. Pretty cool.

Power hiring

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Wed, 02 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I hate people

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Wed, 25 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000

The title of a book is probably to boost sales a little, yet I fell is that “Office survival guide” would be a better title for this position.

This book is basically for people who haven’t read XKCD or Dilbert. If you’ve read those, you know how difficult it sometimes is to get things organized in the office. But if you haven’t, I suggest you pick this one. It’s a nice little book summarizing the procedures for getting your work done in a corporate setting.

I'm Feeling Lucky

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sat, 14 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000

David and Goliath

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sat, 07 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This photo tells it all:

And the book is about just that: smaller companies winning over big competitors.

The 4-Hour Workweek

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 02 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000

The real book of real-estate

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Thu, 29 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

People Are Idiots and I Can Prove It!

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sat, 24 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

The Billionaire and the Mechanic

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Wed, 14 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

The art of start

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Fri, 02 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Kawasaki’s book I read long time ago, It’s a nice little booklet, relatively short, relatively packed with content.

So hey – I did what I did with other recommendations of books.

I made up a date in which I want other people think I read it, and after a short break I’m trying to tune jazzy swingy samba sound in the background and recall what did I got from the book.

The checklist manifesto

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Fri, 02 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

The first billion is the hardest

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Fri, 04 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Extreme Toyota

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sun, 23 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Screw business as usual

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Fri, 14 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Father & Son -- my life at IBM

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sat, 08 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Direct from Dell

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sat, 01 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Ben and Jerry

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Fri, 21 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000

One of the widely advertised books on bootstrapping of the company. Coming from nothing to the conclusion that both of the founders want to work together on something fairly non-standard.

There were several good examples on how these two guys had to adjust to the business conditions to connects end to end together.

The story of research and development of cookie dough was quite “different” as I’ve known little to nothing on the process of ice-cream making before. Same about business story behind Cherry Garcia Ice Cream.

Crossing the chasm

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 17 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This is a classic in the Silicon Valley. Not sure if I learned a lot due to my previous studies, but was definitely good to hear known content rephrased.

The Power of Habit

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Fri, 07 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Power of Habit outlines just that: what can be achieved if you restructure your life slightly and align your daily habits to planned targets. I believe it’s from The Power of Habits that I learned about Slow Practice Will Get You There Faster, which is still on my reading list, yet sounds very promising.

The power of very small incremental improvement through the habit which is touched in Duhigg’s book reminded me continuous improvement from the Lean thinking school of Japanese Toyota engineers.

Blink

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 03 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Blink is probably one of the best books of 2014 for me and it positively surprised me. Gladwell touches on the subject of rapid assessments done in various domains of life, including doctors and scientists.

Chapter number one introduced me to the general outline of the book and Gladwell did it in a way to attract the reader. Unlike other audiobooks on which I sometimes zoned out and lost focus, his book made me pay attention. Certain fragments I listened to more than once, just to be able to increase my knowledge assimilation.

Dreaming in code

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Wed, 22 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000

The full title was: Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software. The book explains the story behind Chandler, Mitch Kapor’s open-source pet project in which he invested couple of millions of $$$ and it was failure.

I really expected something different from this book and I really can’t tell how I feel about it.

On one side, the structure of the book is fairly disruptive: its project commentary part, largely documentary, is good and fairly well documented and falls into the category of standard IT books reporting on project’s biography.

The 17 Indisputable Laws of Teamwork

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Thu, 16 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This is a good summary of all management practices from previous books which I’ve read.

I haven’t learnt anything new from this group, but if you haven’t dealt with problems touching team management, I’d say this is probably the best summary so far, with all things present in one place.

Innovate like Edison

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Fri, 10 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Great introduction to the life and achievements of one of the most famous inventors ever lived.

Backstage view on Edison life and his enterprise operation is shown in this book: ideas and inventions, entrepreneurial approach to things and business dealings show Edison not only as a scientist, but as a great business leader.

Very good review on how operation of the first R&D laboratory looked like.

Authors tries to give systematic approach of innovation, but I don’t really believe that. I view the book as a collection of “good to have” advices.

Suze Orman books (9 steps, Courage..., )

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Wed, 02 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000

If you’re a HFT or a Bitcoin trader, these books ARE NOT for you.

However for new to the US financial and investment system, it’s something perfect. Books are targeted toward individual finance, and they literally cover everything from child birth, through college savings to retirement and death. And are starting from death actually.

Really good summary of answers to the most popular financial questions and advices to people willing to protect their day-to-day investments.

Effective negotiating

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sat, 28 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Effective negotiating is something I felt would be worthwhile to study, since the whole subject was relatively new to me.

Once you first meet the US car salesman you just KNOW negotiating is something you must improve.

Letting other person go first is probably the most essential thing derived from this book. Very helpful in salary negotiations.

Getting to win-win is Covey’s passage which is also forwarded to the reader in this thing.

Conversation Power

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Wed, 25 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Not that great - some obvious stuff. Nothing else.

How to Gain 2 Extra Hours a Day

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sun, 22 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000

When I first listened to this book, I started to have a bad opinion about Tracy’s books, since the advice which I have heard is basically: “In order to get more productive and earn 2 additional hours per day is basically show up at work 1 hour early and leave 1 hour late”.

But then is started to slowly make sense – he suggested making lists with priorities, a typical technique known for folks who studied from David Allen’s “Getting things done”.

Guerilla Business School

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sat, 21 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Live recordings from countries other than Poland let me realize how different the society is. It’s very hard for me to believe such a class would have taken place in Poland.

Some parts were nice, but some were a scam. The thing where Eker encouraged people to go and lie in the stores to get free stuff was kind of low in my opinion. It seemed almost like stealing form the store owners by stretching their trust to you.

Coping with difficult people

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sat, 14 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000

The author puts certain classes of personal characters into categories: sherman tanks, snipers, exploders, complainers, silent ones not participating in anything, the ones that agree with everything but don’t produce any results, bulldozers and other.

Each of them is a ticking social bomb which is going to explode in a different time.

For each of them he gives the background and the possible ways to handle the troublesome human being.

As I see it.

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Tue, 10 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000

After great “How to be rich” I decided to immediately order the 2nd book by the oil magnate.

Couple of first chapters were interesting as they showed the life of the man that had it all. He explains his personal life starting from childhood through school, ending on his failures in 5 marriages.

Then he explains state of his business and the way people view and see him. Mentioned is the fact that, just like in Sam Walton’s case, “the richest man” ranking has put him in a lot of trouble..

Beautiful evindence

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Thu, 05 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000

“Beautiful evidence” is similar to “Envisioning information” and felt similar in terms of style of writing, as well as the content itself. The books is good to go through.

Not sure if it’s me only or it’s the true in general, but once again I’ve found Tufte’s comments pretty hard to understand due to his language used. It’s very professorial and overly complex, thus making the content sometimes hard to understand.

Envisioning information

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Tue, 27 Aug 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Edward Tufte’s books were on my TODO for 2 years now (I got the 4 pack from somebody who apparently participated in the tutorial), but haven’t had a chance to actually read them.

Pretty difficult to start from due to the artistic vocabulary and pretty dense language, I proceed with “Envisioning information” as the first book from the collection.

Pretty amazing research has been done to create a book of that type. Examples of the art forms comes from several centuries and spun many countries.

Made in America

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Tue, 20 Aug 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This book was quite amazing. It’s funny that there are people like Sam Walton, who decided to leave some heritage and write a piece like that.

It’s probably one of the top 10 business books which I’ve read and really liked.

The book starts with Walton reaching a problematic moment of realizing he’s the no. 1 on the list of the richest American, and news rumoring about him leaving fairly modest life in Bentonville, Arkansas. Walton then backtracks his life from the beginning, by starting from the beginning - on how he was born and raised in pretty typical family, in times of great depression, where every penny counted.

Netscape Time

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Tue, 13 Aug 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Having read “The New New Thing” and later having a chance to meet Jim Clark in person, I’ve decided to consume one more book on a topic of how starting pretty niche business in the old times looked like.

Clark book is also more important to me, since it’s written by himself for the readers, so lots of things are mentioned which have not been touched in “The New New Thing”.

Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sat, 03 Aug 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I don’t know how many times I’ve been starting this audiobook and giving up, since the beginning of this book is pretty stiff. Some days I preferred to just drive without anything in my ears, than just starting this book. Be armored with patience! But having gotten used to the author’s tone and pace and tempo, I proceed with it.

Something is sure about this book – the story of Carnegie’s life is very different to what we see in nowadays in Silicon Valley. It was neither fast nor innovative, and book explains slow and gradual process of him becoming a steel magnate.

Brian Tracy books...

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 22 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Not too much will be put here.

I decided to give Brian Tracy’s book a try, and I’m a little bit disappointed. Looks like Tracy did what Knuth did for computer science: collected everything in the one place and brought several contributions.

Most of the stuff in Tracy’s books is a collection of examples and quotes from other authors like Napoleon Hill or Earl Nightingale.

I picked stuff related with saving time and managing your time efficiently. First was basically “work more, wake up early, go home late” type of advise. The 2nd was “Getting things done”.

Mental toughness training

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 15 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0000

“Mental Toughness Training”, just like its subtitle says, is a guide to achieving ideal performance at will.

Ever wondered what top golf or training players feel when they’re challenged with a need of winning this last match? Or hitting the last ball?

This book gives good overview how people train themselves to achieve that.

It was fairly interesting – good catch for a foggy day.

The Millionaire Mind

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Wed, 15 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Slightly updated version of the previous masterpiece.

My understanding from the book is that Stanley assisted by his friend picked 3000 households with net worth in range of $1M–$10M and got about 750 replies. Among them very pretty interesting notes..

..on how people from the group get their shoes repaired, instead of thrown away.

Some pretty interesting obvious stuff is mentioned in this book. For example: how a gentleman with no college made a very obvious statement: what sense does it make to enter a business with a lot of competition? Little. He entered niche business: selling used truck car parts. Sevenfold profit on each of the part.

Jack - Straight from the Gut

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Tue, 14 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000

U la la. Weird feeling that is when content you’re hearing in the very moment sounds familiar. The previous lecture about General Electric entitled “Winning” I believed filled me in with enough details, and wanted to stop listening. But I persisted and ended up being happy about it.

Some content present in this book didn’t show up in “Winning” and is actually totally new content. After which I reminded myself that’s the autobiography of Jack Welch.

MicroISV

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Fri, 10 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000

MicroISV was on Joel Spolsky MBA list, which I basically follow in my reading. Nifty nice little book from Welsh about point of having your own small place in the universe; you small mill for constructing software and hopefully having customers for it.

Not a big fan of a books of that kind, however good review of software testing software was done in this book. AutomatedQA is something pretty interesting–I was told by a friend of mine such a software doesn’t exist, and here it is.

Long Walk to Freedom

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sat, 04 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Haven’t spent too much time reading anything from outside of the business world lately, but decided to break the bad habit. I picked “Long Walk To Freedom”, since it was present on “50 success classics” which somehow showed up on my list.

Pretty impressive story of Mandela’s life and his presence in South Africa.

Other day friend of mine Jonathan had said 50cent has been shot 9 times, and is an donor to charity. Don’t get me wrong – Jonathan is as far from being a genius as I am, however he also asked crucial questions: “What can put a guy who was shot 9 times down? What are you going to tell him to make him scared?”

The Power of Less

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Thu, 02 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Leo’s book I really enjoyed. I’m not alone in terms of trying to simplify things around.

There’s SO many approaches.

If you’re ever seen me couple of years ago working on my laptop, you’d see very minimalistic setup. It was FreeBSD-powered laptop, with dwm window manager, which I still think is the best window manager ever developed and with lots of work-spaces opened.

However I never really had a need to collect tasks and work on them to achieve the goal. Things for the university I tried to kept done on time as they came in to the “in basket”, so that I had a chance and time to work on my “own” thing. For other stuff, which includes mostly Open Source stuff like FreeBSD and some other minor projects, I never kept track of anything.

Learning Node

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Be warned – this is boring and technical thing

In between my Silicon Valley/business/MBA studies, which finally started to make me pretty tired, I decided to revert back to something people consider neat and hot and technically sexy. Something that can expand your skill-set to something better than “mere mortal”.

Javascript is something I explored multiple times. Typically considered a technology for the weak NOPs and “MOV r0,r0,r0”-kind of people, I felt it’s perfect for me. Javascript had lots of things which kept me mentally stimulated. I think most of the interest towards to Javascript was caused by Douglas Crockford’s publication, especially:

How to Get Rich

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sun, 28 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I DO NOT RECOMMEND THIS BOOK.

Felix, thanks a lot!

How to Be Rich

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

From the legend himself.. Basically very unique thing. I really wanted to get a book from first person perspective. Previous content I consumed was generated by human being of moderate wealth. People, who went on their way of setting up companies, building products and successfully selling them.

Nobody as far as I know got really wealthy. Well, maybe Larry Ellison and Jim Clarke did, but others didn’t.

Funny thing is that most of people who wrote motivational books on obtaining money and wealth never really had true riches under their control. I don’t think Napoleon Hill was really a wealthy man. We could consider him exceptionally wealthy based on number of other guys who he motivated, but that doesn’t count.

The Art of Start

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Kawasaki’s book I read long time ago, It’s a nice little booklet, relatively short, relatively packed with content.

So hey – I did what I did with other recommendations of books.

I made up a date in which I want other people think I read it, and after a short break I’m trying to tune jazzy swingy samba sound in the background and recall what did I got from the book.

Succeeding as first time manager

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This was actually pretty good!

When you’re relatively good at something, and you need to train somebody or show the person how to execute particular task, this book can be really helpful.

It especially targeted towards people being actual managers, however I must say several of the hints were pretty useful for day-to-day corporate operation.

Example:

In case of explaining complex chain of tasks which have to be executed in a given order and sequence, and they have to be done certain way in order to accomplish desired result, trick “I’m not sure if I made it clear; do you think you could rephrase with your words what you think I meant…” is perfect.

The science of getting rich

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

So the beginning reminded me “The 21 immutable laws of marketing”, where they describe that if other areas of science can have their laws, why marketing can’t? Similar to “Think and grow rich”, where the law of success is considered one of the nature’s law. Well, it’s a scam, unless you believe in it, in which case it helps you and brings your confidence up. So basically it’s up to you. Lets say this: regardless if you’re believer or not, if you assume in this heresy is 0.001% true, it’s likely to be helpful.

Everyone else must fail

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Think about me whatever you want, I don’t care – I like Larry.

Lets say this: from all the books I’ve read the common thing between all leaders is that they happen (accidentally?) business oriented.

Some people say: Microsoft is sh@t, they never figured out anything by themselves, they stole DOS from a company that code fraction of what they could really earn. They delivered stuff that wasn’t stable, nearly never work and of course – software design is wrong. APIs suck as hell.

The Master Key System

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sun, 14 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

My brain is overflowing with content of that kind already, so nothing new here. If you’ve reach “Think and grow rich”, you’re unlikely to need this one anytime soon.

Mindset

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This book would fit pretty well with “The Talent Code” and “Talent is overrate”. Carol Dweck explains problem solving approaches and the attitude towards doing so.

Growth and fixed mindset are the main approaches for this book. Fixed approach is when a person assumes no change can be made. Or when failure labels him with a loser’s tag. Or when a single digit or event makes him feel like it’s not his thing.

The Cathedral and the Bazaar

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sun, 07 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Nice overview on the open source world and old times of software development.

Linux kernel is said to be the successful project, where the leader lets other people contribute the code, yet he preserves the right to question decisions and manage the development roadmap.

Raymond expresses his sympathy towards “lean” techniques of software development, versus what he calls “cathedral” development style (aka waterfall model, in the software engineering “new talk”).

Titan

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

True story behind William A. Rockefeller, known as “Devil Bill” and later, one and only: John D. Rockefeller.

Nice chunk of American history and point of view on wealth.

Very enlightening in terms of how business works. Making deals with other companies to achieve common goal was something new at the time Rockefeller started Standard Oil Company.

The thing is that Rockefeller wasn’t the first one to discover oil in Cleveland, Ohio. However he somehow managed to get his feet in a door, managed to survive and figured out a niche way of dropping prices.

Ignore Everybody

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Didn’t really know what to think about this book. Started just fine–nice story about New York City and having fun. Author described his niche habit of drawing things on the back of business cards, and how people felt it’s ridiculous.

His faith in doing something he liked and believed in was one of the advices. This is a point of view not matching the iterative, incremental model of improvement and trying to walk over and adjust. He matched whatever he wanted.

What would Google do?

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This is a pure propaganda!

Reading this thing lead to mixed feelings, however I consider the overall experience – the aftertaste – to be positive. Praising Google for pretty much every single action in the history of its operation not necessarily agrees with my vision of the Internet, but author’s points are valid.

Google made a huge impact on the relationship between a customer and the company. First of all when I started to use Google it felt more like an institution, than a company, since the main thing – the “www.google.com” – didn’t have advertisements and other annoying and troublesome usability thingies, that designers from other search shops absolutely have to add.

JavaScript: The Definitive Guide

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sun, 24 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000

1/3rd of book is good. The rest was basically API manual pages all over the place and DOM browser hierarchies explained. I skipped those.

1/3rd I went through was decent. Javascript is like C, but slightly more extended.

Unless you buy stuff from used book outlets via Amazon I don’t recommend. Other than that: $4 well spent.

Jim Rohn's weekend leadership event

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000

By all means this is a great content, which I can highly recommend. Rohn is an excellent speaker; very easily to listen and understand. Everything taught came from relatively recent materials, thus thing heard from this audiobook are likely to be easily understood by you and your kid.

Rohn has a very similar speaking style to Zig Ziglar – along the main motivational content and success “preachings”, he mentions his influences from religion and God. He also jokes quite a bit, and unlike other people, he uses pretty strong sense of humor – nearly Polish.

How to Delegate

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I picked one of my weak points and decided to see what other people can tell me about it.

Lohr’s audio program was pretty good. He mentions one of the key points of delegation, which includes: delegation as a key of making really big projects possible. The thing I typically have a problem is is delegation of stuff which I know I can do well by myself.

The bad thing is that once I’m set on the model of how given activity must be performed or I know how the method of achieving the goal should look like, it’s quite hard to convince me otherwise.

The Power of Positive Thinking

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000

One of the books that I didn’t quite “get”, and thus didn’t really enjoy. The thing is that unlike other positive thinking lectures, this position is strictly religion intensive. Basically it felt like a study on God and religion, with the flavor of success in life.

Nothing bad in this approach. It just didn’t suit me. The book is too very traditional–passes only values which could be considered as “old”.

Land of Lisp

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Full title “Land of Lisp: Learn to Program in Lisp, One Game at a Time!”

Book is quite unique: written by MD.

This time I picked something that I’ve never had a chance to study, which is LISP. Lots of storytelling is going on about impact of LISP on other computer technologies.

I was inspired to look at LISP due to several reasons, but mostly because of preaching of a friend of mine, who advised me to look at it, even from the purely historical reasons. Another reason was “Hackers and Painters” and Paul Graham’s advertising of this technology. Mr McCarthy contributions too were the motivating factor.

$100 startup

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sat, 23 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Nice take on how business can look like in nowadays world. In general book draws a picture of modern entrepreneurs, who decide to skip typical corporate culture and start earning money as independent consultants or freelancers. Mostly doing things which they love or at least are interested in.

The message is about figuring out where there’s an overlap between what you like to do or just simply love, and how this hobby and passion could get sold to other people; how other people could benefit from your knowledge and experience which you’ve gained by doing something you love?

Losing My Virginity

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sat, 16 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Yet another WOW on my list. Absolute MUST to read for anybody interested in business. Once of the examples that real entrepreneurs can be born outside of the US, with no “from a shine-box to a millionaire” approach.

However Branson can be called Englishman with the American “dream story”.

From a dyslectic schoolboy, who happened to be very unsuccessful due to his eye problems, through the story of figuring out “Student” magazine can actually be successful, to all sort of spy-alike threads of his life.

How to stay motivated

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sun, 10 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000

It was one of my favorite audio recordings.

One of the longest too.

I didn’t know Zig Ziglar till the study of “50 prosperity classics” and “50 success classics”. His name was mentioned there, and in a pretty strange way. For me it felt like anti-advertising slogan stating Ziglar preaches old-school, Christian way of life, being a father of multiple children and orthodox beliefs. Not being sure what the “traditional” school of positive thinking is, I decided to give Ziglar’s book a try.

DEC is dead. Long live DEC

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sat, 02 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This position was the next one in terms of hi-tech classics. DEC is the company that had put significant ground work for many further accomplishments. If there were no DEC, there would be no PDP.. computer line, and if there was no PDP, who can know if UNIX would have ever been developed?

Looks like number of accomplishments coming from DEC are mostly due to the culture and value of culture company has put into it’s core philosophy. Was DEC a geeks dream? From the introduction it looks like. Ken Olsen’s company is being described as the place, where over all costs (something that had lead DEC to a failure), the interesting technical works was put in front of everything. Customers weren’t as valued as they should be.

Talent code

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Full title: The Talent Code: Greatness Isn’t Born. It’s Grown. Here’s How.

As opposed to “Talent is overrated”, this book covered topics touching scientific parts of talent, like myelin presence, meaning, production and others.

Melanin is related with neuron training and communication, leading to better structure of human brain.

Here too information about not really recognizing something like “talent” has been confirmed.

Interestingly author shows examples of top performers, who asked about the practice revealed, there there’s absolutely no unique or extraordinary secret about they. Some of them were unable to identify anything special about their practice.

Dealers of Lightning

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Man, that’s amazing, but it’s like an N-th book on “Building a computer” story.

Probably slightly different given how special XEROX PARC and their Alto computer was.

Interesting business point was raised in the book:

“If you get a contract for $100k installation of printing services and you worry you won’t be able to keep up, it’s better to refuse the deal. Sending people to fix the printers might be more expensive than $100k and you’ll be loosing money.”

50 Success Classics

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This book was mentioned in “50 Prosperity Classics”, since it apparently was the “first one”. It’s similar in nature. Book list is slightly different. As well was used to adjust my reading plans for 2013.

On A Roll

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sun, 13 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Since the first sentence in this book I knew it’d be a very interesting lecture. Lets say that after the first sentence I knew I must read this book no matter how bad it’ll be :)

It was great, not to say “Excellent”.

Sometimes I’m pretty surprised why people like Jonas bother to write books, but I think it’s just to try something different. And from boredom.

Book covers the entrepreneurial rising of Jonas, who looks like humble and modest, but truly exceptional individual: a kid, who knew exactly what’s going to happen in his future from the very early years of his life.

50 Prosperity Classics

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Nice overview of 50 books related to prosperity. I picked this one to target myself for 2013.

My Amazon wish-list got modified accordingly :)

The Automatic Millionaire

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 07 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Magic of regular investing seems to have been with me for a long time. Mostly due to grandmother, who said that not a single person in our family would end up well if not her habit of money saving.

According to her, if you know the power of habit, you’re saved. We knew it, but just in case we were somehow reminded Every Single Time we meet in a family circles or even in the occasional phone conversations.

Talent is overrated

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Fri, 04 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This book delivered a confirmation to my belief. If you have ever played a musical instrument, this book will also deliver very solid background on why you can only succeed in playing well by practicing regularly.

Colvin completely overturns the vision of talent. Due to his research in psychological and sociological tests done over the years it seems no such a thing as talent can be proven to exist. Thus, want it or not, “all people are born equal” seems to be the case. Blaming yourself now, huh?

Six thinking hats

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Tue, 01 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I didn’t really know what to expect out of this book, but in general my understanding is it’s a directed way for generating common voice and opinions on particular case/problem.

You lead the meeting between multiple people in a directed way (which actually can be called “blue hat”) and have people talk about the same case from different perspective.

De Bono gave an example of a group of people looking at the big, square-shaped house. Looking together at the same wall from the same perspective can lead to much better perception of the building. Often it can lead to agreements on what we see, and how we perceive certain walls. This is as opposed to having uncoordinated effort of seeing things: people alone walking around the building for 10 minutes and meeting later to discuss what they saw.

No asshole rule

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 31 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I scored 7/23 on “Are you an asshole” scale, which makes me be in a “You have to watch yourself” category.

Based on the question in the questionnaire I think some more questions would have to be added, to make this list not overly sensitive.

My company in the context of “Good companies to work for” is mentioned in this book, among few other good examples.

Several examples or harassment are actually hard to believe, since most of the American companies are “equal opportunity” places, meaning what e.g.: using racial comments in an argument with another person is strictly prohibited. Thus not sure why activities mentioned in this group sometimes become routine for some individuals (on the other hand why do equal opportunity employers hand you a “White/Black/Asian/Indian” form at the beginning of your contract?)

Peopleware

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sat, 29 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Biggest effort in making project happen is figuring out social problems: managing people, managing expectations, figuring out issues and disagreements. Most common cause of project failure is making mistakes in one of those areas, and not areas directly related with technology.

Large portion of this book I already consumed by reading Joel Spolsky’s blog and books, and it’s not surprising, since he wrong a cover comment about the Peopleware.

Big impact on the project success or failure lies in workers conditions: quiet office space, comfortable furniture, lighting, environment and everything else relating with “relaxed” attitude towards bringing intellectual contributions.

101 Secrets of Highly Effective Speakers

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Thu, 27 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This is kind of interesting book about what to do and what to avoid while speaking to a large groups of people.

Posture, appearance and diction is important to be well understood. Seeing a speaker with a suit, or in general: dress well and clean, gives much better impression than seeing somebody with a own, worn T-shirt.

Content is what matters. Every speech should have an objective, and this objective should be clearly stated to the audience.

The Goal

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Thu, 20 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Amazing take on a lean approach of business management. I didn’t believe it’ll be a valuable book, but boy.. was I wrong! Excellent position. Similar to Toyota concepts, but with so much better storyline.

Author grabbed the agile practices and wrapped them in a fictional storyline in a way that made it actually a very interesting fiction book.

Reads like a novel, and touches some social aspects of the management.

The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sat, 15 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Successful duet of Ries and Trout deliver another content together 2nd time in a row.

I do agree with other people whom I have discussed this book with: examples mentioned can be questionable. Basically it looks they wanted to confirm their theories with practice by giving examples, but the way it’s done makes you feel like: “Oh gosh. If I wanted, I could provide 100 different counter examples”.

Marketing is more like a “social engineering”, or “psychological engineering”, and I believe failures of products and companies mentioned here weren’t entirely due to what authors mentioned–failure to comply with one of the 22 laws.

The One Minute Manager

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This is one of the well recognized corporate classics.

Perfect beginning, which is true, so I started to read on and continued (line by line) up until the end.

Excellent storyline with some good advises about communicating with people during projects you guys are working on.

Without rewriting portions of the book I can say lots of good points are raised in this position and I’d consider this as “MUST READ” for every single manager.

The Old New Thing

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Fri, 07 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

First time I learnt from Raymond Chen from Microsoft blog articles, and I wished there was a book with his blog entries, so that I don’t have to stare at LCD.

And there was.

Really nice walk-through around why Windows is the way it is, and how many problems Windows development team had to solve, in order to deliver a successful product.

“USB cart of death” and 20-feet long computer is something I could potentially advertise and try out in a company, as a part of daily job. We’ll see. Sounds like testing at Microsoft was a really import part of the product cycle (which only confirms stuff from “Showstopper”).

The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sun, 02 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Silicon Graphics story and why it’s not worth to take investors early!

Netscape story.

Healtheon story.

WebMD story.

All around Jim Clark and his ideas.

Excellent book. Excellent storyline. Highly recommended.

Positioning

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sat, 17 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This book was similar to “22 laws of marketing”.

Positioning is what I’d say a strategy for creating a perception about your product in customer’s mind.

The need for positioning is backed by the huge number of new products coming from all sorts of markets.

Getting into prospect’s mind is heavily emphasized (“it’s not a battle of products, it’s a battle of perceptions”).

Interesting strategy of using a competitors position to re-position yourself is explained (“We try harder” case). This is stuff that I never really paid attention to.

Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 12 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Dean of usability so impressed me with his https://www.useit.com/, that I decided to read his books. After I was happy with “Design of everyday things”, I decided to stick to his usability suggestions. I couldn’t find any book about application design, but since modern applications are likely to be done through the browser anyway, I decided to stick to his books about web pages.

This book went through some designs and explained in a great detail, what is done wrongly, and what could be improved.

HDL Chip Design

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This is the best book so far from all books I’ve seen about Verilog.

Don’t get me wrong: it’s “just OK” compare to some computer programming books out there, but in terms of digital design, I can recommend it.

This book showed me direct relationship between the Verilog syntax and actual resulting circuit in the device.

If you have a problem mapping if and else and ternary operators to the hardware, I recommend this book to you.

Winning

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Thu, 25 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

High “OMG” factor for me. Price of the book to knowledge “sold” ratio is very high here.

General Electric, or maybe rather Edison General Electric, is a result of successful entrepreneurial skills of Thomas Edison. Given this links to the whole Hill, Ford, Schwab chain, I just couldn’t resist from reading that one.

Welch, in his 20-year CEO career at GE experienced pretty much all possible cases of business success/failure. Starting from needing to close facilities, to drop businesses and stay with only the successful one, to figuring out solutions in crisis situations.

The Field

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sat, 20 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I somehow didn’t like this one. I think author is wrong and the fact that people driving in the same and saying the same thing is just a beauty of randomness, and not the result of communicating subconsciously.

I liked some ideas in the sense I liked but refused to accept Hill’s claim that “Law of Success” is the law of nature. I just don’t believe in things like that.

Rich Dad Poor Dad

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sun, 14 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Full title is “Rich Dad Poor Dad: What The Rich Teach Their Kids About Money That the Poor and Middle Class Do Not!”

I think it was one of the first pieces about collecting wealth that I’ve read. Typically it’s relatively boring, and few authors can dress useful content in a decent storyline. Kiyosaki managed to succeed.

Narrator introduces the whole thing as having the best friend, and using his father’s advise for proceeding with business approach. Rich Dad.

Little Red Book of Selling: 12.5 Principles of Sales Greatness

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I didn’t like this one at the beginning, since it sounds like a book written by a salesperson, but … I forced myself to finish. Conclusion: good study on sales and selling and marketing.

Then I learned all of his books at least once were on top #1 of Amazon.com, and…

I confess: I went through while “Little book..” series, including “Gold” and “Green”, as well as “Sales bible”.

The general message is: as a salesman, you’ll have to work your ass off for being truly successful.

Starting Forth

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sun, 07 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

One of the technical classics, which I have promised myself to read.

This book is about concepts of Forth programming and underlying stack machines.

If you have ever wondered how early chips could still achieve speed and perform complex tasks with extremely tight memory limits, this book is for you.

Also, this book serves like a nice introduction to the stack concepts. If you’ve ever wondered how PUSH, POP and couple of others can get glued together to serve useful functions, you’ll find it here.

The E-Myth Revisited

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Wow!

Full title is “E-myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It” and let me tell ya, oh boy, oh boy. He really meant it!

This is absolutely truly magnificent view on the meaning of your own business. This is a true black hat for those, who think that thanks to the skill of doing something on a decent level, they can grow to be a business owner.

Microserfs

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sat, 29 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I had a mixed feelings about this one. It described strange culture of Microsoft and their corporate environment. I can assume some stuff changed till now (2012), but I wonder how much is preserved.

My personal experiences shows that the most technically skilled people are just normal, not “freaky”, and they have normal life and families.

Of course there’s nothing wrong in spending 20 hours straight trying to figure out technical problem in your source code. However when it’s your job’s habit, it’s less fun

The Anatomy of Buzz

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Thu, 20 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000

How the word spreads.

You work on one thing, you don’t tell too many people about it. You get an e-mail about this thing and you wonder: how is that possible ?

This book shows numerous of cases like that. It does explain why people form networks and how knowledge about products flow through the networks.

Ever heard of Derek Sivers? Ever heard how his CD-Baby business kept growing? This is an exact explanation of the whole phenomenon.

Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 17 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Short, little, geeky story about Linus and Linux, copyrights and ownership, coding, software culture and others like that.

This book met my expectations and delivered good outline on the history of Linux development.

The thing which I didn’t know before was that Linus stole MINIX mailing lists and that he was doing release announcements there.

The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Being over-ambitious is the worst of all sin. I promised myself to seek for recommendations for good books and stick to them and listen to nobody’s rules and consume books one at a time. I forced myself to not switch between book to book, even though book doesn’t seem to be a perfect match with my interests right away.

Most of the books which got recommended to me were very interesting. However, listening through “Zen and Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” was like a walk through hell, specially that in one third of the book I just couldn’t understand who the Phaedrus is. Even though pretty obvious to some, I just didn’t grasp it first time.

The Tipping Point

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Fri, 07 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Full title: “The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference”

Interesting take on spreading epidemies of all sorts.

This is actually about word-to-mouth communications between connectors (people) and mavens (information hubs).

Epidemy of hush puppies is explained here too.

Idea of a new person breaking new grounds and doing something other people don’t consider to be an established standard is explained.

Phenomenon of a broken windows: start preventing small crimes in order to prevent big crimes.

Rework

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I highly recommend you skip this book, since I want to be ahead of you.

SKIP IT, PLEASE.

Guys from https://37signals.com – bows!

Getting things done

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Wed, 15 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This book is, and will be for a long time my number ONE in improving how I function. Surprisingly, I learned about this books from my job, which is uncommon, since it’s a rare to hear book recommendation in between cuboids.

David Allen gives an interesting perspective on the human mind, which apparently sees absolutely no difference between accomplishing huge goals (buy a house) and small goals (make laundry). And minds keeps being occupied by these plans till they get done. Mind also burns energy from you while doing so, so the more tasks you queue in your mind, the more tired and frustrated you tend to be.

How to Stop Worrying and Start Living

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sun, 12 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000

“How to Win…” I got since it was just undeniably one of the most popular American classics, known even by people who don’t read books.

“How to stop worrying and start living” followed, since its title struck me as odd. I expected I won’t be able to handle this book and will stop at some point.

It was actually pretty good. Nothing special, but acceptable.

I write this review after some after of actually going through the book, however I know I often come back to “The Law of Averages” for assessing risk, as well as to stories mentioned at the end of the book. This little 300-page piece helped me a bit with driving. Driving a car in the US, which is outside of my comfort zone, has fallen into categories of my worries, but according to these (oh well, probably faked) examples, worrying is common.

Random notes on "Barely usable"

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 06 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Hall in my new apartment is narrow enough to make it impossible to bring ANY form of the furniture in. Wanna desk? NEEEEEEEEEEE. Cupboard? NEEEEEEEEEEEEE. Just impossible. Last 8 months I tried to live without a desk, but I must admit — just like the Internet access, I really do need a desk. I guess better chair is yet another investment I need to make. Anyway: hall = too narrow.

How to win friends and influence people

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sun, 05 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000

There is a lot of hardcore technical books on my shelf, but before I’ll grab them and study more chip design and other geeky stuff, I decided to start pruning the queue of my “to read” list from something more lightweight.

Also, I believe I’ll need to read more about effective communication skills and more about what is/isn’t considered inappropriate while replying to e-mails and text messages, and this book somehow felt into this plan.

Don't make me think

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Fri, 03 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000

After I finished:

The Design of Everyday Things

I went for:

Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Edition

And this is how link “Blog” from the left side of this page points to the page entitled “Blog”, instead of “Recent blog entries”.

Really good for people with “Even I would have done this page a bit better”…

The Millionaire Next Door

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Fri, 27 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Full title “The Millionaire Next Door : The Surprising Secrets of America’s Wealthy”

This is basically a mix of psychology, sociology, economy and business. I expected beginning will only be interesting, but this book positively surprised me. This book is an amazing chunk of research on social and material relationships among wealth Americans.

By wealthy people authors consider $1M–$10M of accumulated wealth. Study conducted over several years (since 1980). Book was published 1996, however the version I listened to referred to 2005 too, so it was likely an updated edition.

Anything you want

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Wed, 25 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000

About Derek I learnt by accident.

Sort of.

After reading Spolsky’s blog and his recommendation of doing some writing on the side as a next step in boosting your communication skills, I came up with an idea for making my own page, where I could write this and that.

I knew little about blogs, so I Googled this and that, and found “Technical Blogging”:

How to move mount Fuji

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Tue, 17 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000

…or Shockey Semiconductor and hiring smart people

Interesting feeling it is when you’re reading about places where significant accomplishments had happened before you’ve been born. And especially when you do it while sitting in one of these well-known places.

I started reading “How to move Mount Fuji” and actually this book positively surprised me. I expected only questions and reasoning on how recruiters think, but encountered a pretty big chunk of history of Silicon Valley and the background behind it after all. Lewis Terman’s craziness of IQ testing, Shockey’s genius and his magic team of 8; Fairchild Semiconductor and others.

The Best Software Writing I

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Fri, 13 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This time Joel acted as a art connoisseur, who picked the best miniature art forms and glued them together and commented on.

Ken Arnold’s “Style is substance” has so many good ideas, that I felt like I could have written this chapter myself (joking – I just really always wanted to have C-like-Python, where C code would preserve it’s syntax, but there “\t” and " " wouldn’t be neutral).

Raymond’s Chen “Why not to block apps that rely on undocumented behavior” pushed me to get back to his Microsoft blog and ordering his book “The Old New Thing”.

The Strangest Secret

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sat, 07 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This is one of the most influential books that I recommend to people. Earl Nightingale is probably right after Napoleon Hill on the success preachings ladder.

I listened to this one and I admit it was a pleasant experience.

Probably the most effective and powerful content I’ve injected myself.

Interestingly, this content was broadcasted in the US radio in 60’s. Being an excellent speaker let him to deliver the content in a very attractive form. Just like with Hill, falling asleep with Nightingale’s speeches isn’t possible.

Almost usable — Sharp MFP printer menu

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 02 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I decided to give Sharp MFP printer a try. I’m pretty conservative (lets say I’m radical: if something works nicely for me, I don’t wanna change). But printers which we had here in the company never really worked for me, since on the floor of hundreds of people printers are the things that nearly never work. Either lack of toner or lack of skilled human being to figure out, what’s wrong with the darn machine, which claims it’s jammed, but it’s not.

Design of everyday things

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Thu, 28 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Boy ooohhh boy! Do I get frustrated by design of some objects of my daily use! No longer do I feel like a source of problem when encountering a difficulty with usage of things supposedly being trivial to use. No more!

I complained publicly about various things, including Opera browser and my bank’s Internet portal, however I’ve always felt bad about it (“Hm.. They have dozens of people working on that with thousands of data points gathered by statistical analysis – since nobody else complains, I must be the stupid one”).

Figuring out confusing assembly instructions — Koszek trick #2

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Tue, 26 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Today’s post will be very simple, maybe trivial. One of the hacks that I came up with, when I encountered confusing arcane of ANSI C, or when I played with assembly for fun and profit.

Problem: isolate ANSI C construct or in-line assembly block, so that upon a translation to intermediate assembly, block will be exposed more easily in a visual manner.

So imagine you want to isolate memory reference within ANSI C and figure out what the corresponding assembly line is. Assume given portion of the code:

Getting to Yes

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sat, 16 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

“Getting to Yes–Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In”

This is something which I think Robert Watson of FreeBSD “Hall Of Fame” is the master of. I remember what attracted me to FreeBSD was mostly written by Robert. Even stuff which wasn’t technical seemed to make so much sense..

So the thing in arguments is to not try to convince each about each other’s point of view, which typically is pointless, but to find common goal and work your way to achieve it. This is explained as “not bargaining about positions”.

Cross-compile GNU assembler for MIPS

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sun, 10 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Just a short note, not to have to walk through the Web each time I want to get some strange opcodes generated.

Today “strange” means “MIPS”. “Nobody uses MIPS”, you say? Well – I still believe MIPS is the cleanest RISC architecture available today. So yes, I want to have something translate:

_start:
	addi	$2, $2, 123
	addi	$3, $3, 321
	add	$4, $2, $3

	addi	$5, $5, 1
	addi	$6, $6, 2
	or	$7, $5, $6

	addi	$8, $8, 0xf
	addi	$9, $9, 0x3
	and	$10, $8, $9

To:

More Joel on Software

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sun, 10 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

No worse than the predecessor, this book is a mandatory item for everybody related to the hi-tech world in any way.

You’ll find hints, tips&tricks and dark secrets in the areas of hiring, project management, software engineering as well as marketing and selling your products.

Highly recommended.

The Lean Startup

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Thu, 24 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

The thing is that IMVU’s idea was one of the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. But it’s only because I don’t buy ideas with virtual reality. I’m a retarded alien who just enjoys fresh air and nature. So … I expected this book will be about absolute failure.

And to some sense, it was. But not entirely.

After this lecture, I think I understand the lean business process more..

fpurge() hack — Koszek trick #1

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sat, 19 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

A friend of mine asked me once:

How to recover text formatted by printf(), but do not spit it output to the console?

Right now I don’t exactly remember why fprintf() couldn’t be used, but I remember this was in the environment where fprintf() (or all?) changes couldn’t be applied.

This is a technique I was came up with. Please note: this is HUGE hack and it is not proven to work on your system. It is based on the fact data from printf function family is first written to the buffer buf, and until it’s internally flushed, it won’t be printed. Lack of flush is implicitly expected due to the large buffer size, and buffering set by setbuf. Once we generate enough data in the buf buffer through fprintf calls, we copy the data to text buffer, and discard buf buffer. Discarding happens via fprune and its associated file descriptor, for which buffer has been used for.

01001011, or on the art of snare drum patterns

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Thu, 17 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Below is my short experiment on finding an analogy between two of things I like: computers and music. Sometimes when I think about snare drum technique, I really feel it’s the most awkward activity which human being came up with.

Really. Think about it for a moment.

Adult man takes a pair of wooden sticks, plastic head stretched on the wooden, round frame, which resonates and makes stretched head’s surface pretty damn loud and starts hitting this surface. On purpose. For a long time, with high level concentration, heading towards perfection in the evenness of strokes and sounds.

Funny mistakes and The Toyota Way

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 14 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This article has a strange mix of UNIX and methodology and mental problems of post’s author, related with inspirations from the The Toyota Way. I read The Toyota Way, since I tried to find something related to couple of things I’m interested in: (1) how companies work (2) Japanese culture (3) computers. (3) I involved myself. The way I think about stuff in “The Toyota Way” is that I’ll not only get to know how Toyota solves problems, but I’ll bring experiences from the book to my problem solving, mental toolset and I’ll transmute them to my daily job with UNIX systems.

Unfriendly IT, or how to get Perforce diffs e-mailed to you

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sun, 13 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Work for a big corporation can be very challenging sometimes. This touches me especially when I have to request something, and IT department doesn’t agree for providing me this functionality. Sometimes things are very simple, sometimes are more complex.

In this particular case, I tried to provide myself a way to review Perforce commits other person working with me was doing. Solution, which we all know to be pretty darn good, is to have diffs e-mailed to you, just like we do on:

Joel on Software

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sat, 12 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

U la la. Just read. Simply read and enjoy. I think this is number #1 in terms of “what changed my approach to software engineering”.

In order to write this review, I’d have to simply rewrite this book with my own words, since pretty much everything there shows you real-world approach on writing and selling your products, and not only.

MUST HAVE for everybody seriously thinking about making software.

Showstopper!

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sat, 05 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

“Your ass is grass, and I’m a lawnmower”

“I’ll walk through your wall”

This book was really educational. Showing Windows NT development from the backstage is something I really enjoyed.

The whole thing is actually a biography of Dave Cutler, ex-DEC software type, who was brought to Microsoft to architect “Next-Technology” system.

Designed from scratch, was considered one of the biggest software project of that kind back then.

The thing that interested me ware software engineering practices, and I think I wasn’t disappointed with this book.

How to write a good Google Summer of Code Proposals

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sat, 28 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Let me keep it short. As short and concrete as your proposal should be. I document my examples with this years proposals, but the fact you see title of your project here means nothing. These are just examples.

Project title

Nothing more here. Keep it short and precise. NTFS for FreeBSD is so much different than Proposal for FreeBSD. Positively different.

Short description

I always try to think that lesser is more. Please keep it short. Very short. Lets make it 2-sentence short. So short description can contain 1 sentence answer for each of the questions:

Google Summer of Code — how proposals are evaluated

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

In the previous post I explained the motivation behind GSoC and the state of things with regards to how it helps FreeBSD.

I guess I must explain a bit more on how GSOC proposal evaluations are done, since it can be not entirely clear to outsiders.

Introduction

Below you’ll find an insight on how the evaluation of Google Summer of Code took place for the FreeBSD project, but please not that people and projects vary in how they treat their students and participants. Having said that, over the years of GSoC participation I’ve had a chance to interact with other teams, and their experiences and the approach are similar to FreeBSD’s in how the communicate, help and judge students.

Google Summer of Code — my take

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

So it has been a week since I reviewed 32 Google Summer of Code proposals for FreeBSD. If you don’t know anything about it, try to see Google’s Google Summer of Code website. In short it’s a sponsored action that lets students spend their summer (8 weeks) hacking Open Source projects, learning new stuff, helping the community, growing as programmers and engineers and additionally – earning some additional money.

Organization gets $500 for accepted project. Students gets $5000 for accepted project. In the middle of the deadline (midterm) students receive 50% of their expected compensation: $2500. The rest comes at the end.

Hackers and painters

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I’m catching up with a list of computer classics and reading Graham’s Hackers and painters

I really expected this book will be about bearded guys arguing about Linux vs GNU/Linux and about how we all eat in front of the LCD screens, bend our necks over laptops with USB flashlights etc..

Books positively surprised me

Really nice take on business and technology. Mix of things in about right proportions.

This book is a statement of “Start small” and “growing business”.

The 7 habits of highly effective people

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Covey’s classic was well-known around my company. Looks like at some point in time this book was handed to people. Some of them claimed they were forced to read it.

I think “renegotiating agreement” is something that is often heard in a big Silicon Valley corporations, and which I think comes straight from this book.

I’m pretty sure “managing expectations” also has its roots here.

Put first things first.

Not sure if it appeared in the written version of the book, but audiobook had an excellent “Green and clean” essay presented. Very nice.

iCON

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sun, 15 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

NOTE This review reads quite funny now, 4 years after I originally wrote it. Since then I’ve moved to Apple ecosystem and I’m quite happy because of it.

Not being Apple practitioner didn’t stop me from reading about Apple and Steve Jobs:

Some conclusions. Consistent project vision and design. Have you ever read Mythical man-month? I see an reverse analogy between S/360 and Apple – having a leader with a vision of a product line is important. It’s sometimes interesting how really big products can succeed when being designed by one person. The most I impressed was by Inside AS/400 which apparently was designed by a single person.

The Toyota Way

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This is one of the most influential books in my life, honestly speaking.

Concept of lean manufacturing can be spread to pretty much anything, and works very, very well.

This changed my view of my work on computers and electronics and life. I try to buy food products and snack more frequently, in smaller quantities.

Notion of process is basically something that I think makes software and hardware successful. I map Toyota’s process to “Joel’s Test” and see it’s not easily met. Having a good flow is very hard, and most companies don’t have that.

The Soul Of A New Machine

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Reading about good old days is something I enjoy in my free time. Getting to know history of computer is something that compensates my general lack of history knowledge, I believe. Not only does the history help you prevent mistakes from the past, but it also inspires to reuse some of the ideas of early giants.

“The Soul Of A New Machine” I found on 2010 on the shelves of unowned books in my company, but I didn’t really have a motivation to read it back then. I saved a title on my Amazon Wishlist.

Think and Grow Rich

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000

CLASSIC.

Secret

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This is where the story with “new school” Hill-alike books started. This book wouldn’t have been such a big and significant step on my reading list, however:

it was recommended to me by my mother, who got it by accident and suggested I may like it
it was first book of that kind that I’ve read
in the Polish edition of this book a lot of other authors of similar books were mentioned…

So the book talks about what I could now call “typical positive thinking” methodology, meaning: motivation and habit of trying to achieve your precisely stated goal is all there is to be successful.

Advisory

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Technical advisory across AI, semiconductors, systems engineering, and regulated industries.

I’ve spent 25 years building technology at every level of the stack – from kernel development and chip tapeouts to AI products serving hospitals and enterprise customers. I’ve raised venture capital, navigated FDA and HIPAA, built teams, and operated as both CEO and CTO. That range is what I bring to advisory engagements.

I work with startups, investors, law firms, government agencies, and enterprise leadership teams. The common thread: hard technical problems where getting it wrong is expensive.

Media Mentions

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Coverage and announcements from my work in the technology industry.

Industry & Press

Segmed Secures $10.4 Million Series A Funding — PR Newswire, 2024
Segmed Achieves ISO 27001 Certification — Segmed, 2024
Segmed and Datavant Team Up for Advanced Imaging Data Integration — Datavant, 2024
Segmed, NVIDIA, and RadImageNet Kickstart Generative AI Initiative for Synthetic Medical Imaging Data — Nasdaq, 2023
Salesforce Buys Twin Prime — TechCrunch, 2016

Academic Publications

Generating Synthetic Data for Medical Imaging — Radiology, Volume 312, 2024
Preparing Medical Imaging Data for Machine Learning — Radiology, Volume 295, 2020
Towards quantifying the development value of code contributions — ESEC/FSE 2018
Bluespec Extensible RISC Implementation: BERI Hardware Reference — Cambridge University, Computer Laboratory, 2015

Conference Talks

P_______SQL: Engine behind a de-identified medical data platform — PostgresConf Silicon Valley 2022, April 2022
Challenges in Assessing Single Event Upset Impact on Processor Systems — SELSE 2015
Soft Error Study of ARM SoC at 28 Nanometers — SELSE 2014 @ Stanford University
FreeBSD driver for the Stanford NetFPGA card — FreeBSD DevSummit @ University of Cambridge, September 2009. Also presented at Ericsson Research Nomadic Lab and HIIT (Finland).
Stanford Ignite — Guest speaker, multiple sessions (2019–present). Private event.
Expeditions Fund Shareholders’ Conference — Invited speaker. Private event.

Open Source Credits

FreeBSD/mips port — BSDCan 2008 — Credited by Warner Losh for stabilizing the FreeBSD MIPS port and bringing it to single-user stage across three platforms.
OpenBSM CREDITS — Contributor to OpenBSM, the BSD audit framework used by FreeBSD and macOS. Hosted by MIT.
FreeBSD Contributors List — FreeBSD src committer since 2006.

If you’re interested in an interview or speaking opportunity, please contact me.

Subscribe to Newsletter

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Join my newsletter to receive new posts and insights directly in your inbox.

Testimonials

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Recommendations from colleagues across Segmed (YC W20), Xilinx (now AMD), Salesforce, and research. All sourced from LinkedIn.

Institutional Track Record

Accelerators: Y Combinator W20, Alchemist Batch 21, StartX Winter 2020, Stanford Ignite, Stanford d.School, Stanford GSB Venture Studio

Investors ($20M raised): Blumberg Capital, Mighty Capital, iGan Capital, Expeditions Fund, Engine Health, Advocate Health

Industry: Salesforce (via Twin Prime acquisition), Xilinx (Zynq — first ARM-based FPGA), Cambridge University Computer Lab, FreeBSD Project (youngest committer, 2006)

Want to work together? Email me directly or read more about what I do.

Adam Koszek - Personal Website

Agent Glass

What I'm Doing Now

Current Focus

Startup CTO

Startup CTO

How to Pronounce My Name

About me

Contact

Links

Speaking

Portfolio

Current

Konobase

Previous

Segmed

Twin Prime → Salesforce

Software

Products & Platforms

Systems & Hardware

FreeBSD & Kernel Development

Writing

Non-Tech Founder Technology Guide

Non-Tech Founder Technology Guide

Stashing Specific Files in Git

The Problem

The Solution

Creating Custom Hugo Shortcodes

What are Shortcodes?

Creating a Basic Shortcode

Solution to an ugly cookie law

Drawing in 30 days

Don't Kid Yourself About Software Bootcamps

To actually ship software, add constraints

Hackers and Cooks: how building software really feels like

Cooks

Great Movies About Design

Which Open Source Projects Should You Contribute To

15 Tips on Staying Productive Offline as a Software Engineer

No distractions

What it's like to write software in the hardware industry

Treat Continuous Integration as your virtual user

Memoirs of Hadrian

Single Command Principle

SSH VPN on OSX with SSHuttle in 3 minutes

Who Says Elephants Can't Dance

How software engineer should invest in career growth

Are you a good Open Source contributor?

Movies every software engineer should watch

Triumph of the Nerds

Something Ventured

How to use Ansible Vault with LastPass

The Outsiders: Eight Unconventional CEOs and Their Radically Rational Blueprint for Success

Everybody Writes

What's the most expensive stage of software engineering?

Shoe Dog: A memoir by the creator of Nike

Making pull requests that merge

Ruby Cookbook

Clean Code

Learn programming: self study guide

How much software engineer should invest in career growth

The Art of Plain Talk

Why you should start programming on UNIX

Scientific Advertising

King of Madison Avenue

The best OSX file manager

Non-designers design book

Reading 101 for software engineers

Ogilvy on Advertising

256 bloghacks

That's why you haven't accomplished enough in 2016

Design for hackers

The Little Book of Common Sense Investing

Building an Open Source iOS app: lessons learned

Slides

Abstract

Failure of my one post per week goal

White Coat Investor

Good to Great

Dealing with large jobs on Travis-CI