The last time I did a blog post on my year-in-review, mostly summarizing my book reads for the year, was 2017. For the past four years, or so, I have not been reading outside the perimeter of software engineering and machine learning, and no presence of mind to share those readings. It was a period of toiling. Extreme toiling. Though the toiling still continues, it is now with remarkable fresh air and scented space. Thanks to my new job.

Kickstarting an upward moving career as a software engineer – machine learning and data engineering, is a major highlight of my 2022. To be clear, I had worked as an application developer and software engineer for business intelligence system, and data science research associate, and lately as a data engineer intern and associate consultant. But moving into a stabilized, financially rewarding, and culturally motivating job can be a life-changing experience. One that struck me most is the privilege of being able to read non-technical books again. Fortunately, there is a book club in my new workplace.

I read Life Is Good by John and Bert Jacobs and am currently reading Mindset by Carol Dweck.

Life Is Good curates recipes for living a happier life through a practical guide to unlock the power of optimism. Carol’s Mindset explains how fixed and growth mindset determine individual’s understanding and handling of successes, failure, and effort. Both books are self-help, motivational books that I needed most as I am faced with the new challenges of climbing the American corporate ladder.

Reading on the technical side continues, as expected. I bought many new titles, devoured few, rummaged many. Among these, of special mentions are Abhishek Thakur’s Approaching (Almost) Any Machine Learning Problem, Mitchell’s Web Scraping with Python, Sebastian et al’s Machine Learning with PyTorch and Scikit-Learn, and Eagar’s Data Engineering with AWS. My learning and work tasks continuously took me to these books, and I found a good companion in them. My hope is to do more technical writing in 2023 to document my learning experience.

Wishing you a prosperous new year in advance.

Happy holidays!