There are lots of books that changed the way I think. An example that may be of special interest to the HN community is "So Good They Can't Ignore You" by Cal Newport (http://calnewport.com/books/so-good/). I have spent lots of time finding the perfect career, until I learned from this book that you must stop finding the perfect career. Just do something that you like enough to spend lots of time on it. Everything else will come. It was very liberating.
It's from 2009, but going through the comments here it seems not much has changed. It will help you choose the right tools, and with many of the open source ones, configure them.
The parallels with the "Daemon" in Daniel Suarez' novel are scary.
small spoiler ahead
This Daemon is an AI that keeps data of big companies hostage - it will destroy all that company's data if the company does not pay protection money, or if the company involves law enforcement.
Because a lot of companies in the novel don't stick to the AI's rules, these companies go down with the exact same symptoms as Maersk is now having:
- unable to do business
- unclear what happened
- declining stock prices
> Now, if someone lets me put images in comments, that would be amazing. Good for state transition diagrams and random scribbles
That's exactly what JetBrains MPS (https://www.jetbrains.com/mps/) does. Even better: the state transition diagram is the code. Some of my colleagues are playing with it - not sure if it's used in production yet.
Taleb investment advice: put almost all of your savings in super stable investments, like treasuries. Use the rest to bet on unicorn startups, or highly leveraged options (as long as those options have a limited downside and an unlimited upside!). I'm not quite sure how to apply this to one's career.
