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Discussion on: I’m Tyler Hawkins β€” Software Engineer, Accessibility Advocate, Musician. Ask Me Anything!

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ellativity profile image
Ella (she/her/elle)

Hey Taylor, so excited to meet you! What was it like being in the Foo Fighters?

Does anyone ever confuse you with that more famous and prolific software engineer Tyler Hawkins?

What do you think the 2 most stand-out books Tyler has read recently are? Asking for a friend.

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thawkin3 profile image
Tyler Hawkins

Haha I love being confused with Taylor Hawkins. He's a much cooler person than I am!

My two favorite latest books... that's a tough one! I have too many favorites at the moment, so I'll go with the two books that I'm currently reading:

Being Wrong by Kathryn Schulz - Such a good book! It's all about exploring the nature of wrongness, the psychology and philosophy of error, the tough questions like "what is truth and how can we know it", and how we can react better when we are wrong about things.

Working Effectively with Legacy Code by Michael Feathers - This one is a software engineering book that's right up there with Clean Code and Refactoring. As the name implies, it gives a bunch of advice on how you can be effective when working on a codebase full of ancient code from 10 years ago that nobody understands. This kind of code is likely poorly documented and not well tested, but you're stuck working with it. It's been super helpful, as this is the kind of stuff that probably 99% of software engineers have to deal with on a daily basis!

Other honorable mentions would be:

  • Essentialism by Greg McKeown
  • The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg
  • Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O'Neil
  • The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande
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ellativity profile image
Ella (she/her/elle)

Haha I love being confused with Taylor Hawkins. He's a much cooler person than I am!

Can't say I'm confident I'd have gotten such a great book list out of Taylor Hawkins... no shade, I can't say I'm confident I'd have gotten such a great book list out of most people, this one is fantastic! Thank you for sharing, and for making both books sound compelling!

If you liked Weapons of Math Destruction, did you also read Twitter and Tear Gas by Zeynap Tufekci?

(Since new books can be outside of some people's budgets, Zeynap negotiated with her publisher for a Creative Commons version in case anyone wants to check it out without spending πŸ’›)

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thawkin3 profile image
Tyler Hawkins

I haven't read Twitter and Tear Gas, but it sounds like I'll need to check it out! The subject and synopsis on the site looks really interesting.