Inspirations
The books, talks, and ideas that changed how I see things.
Books & Stories
Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned
Ken Stanley & Joel Lehman
The book that changed how I think about goals. The argument that objective functions can be deceptive — that the stepping stones to great achievements don't resemble the achievements themselves — is one of the most important ideas I've encountered.
The Name of the Wind
Patrick Rothfuss
Kvothe's Naming — understanding the true nature of something to gain power over it — maps perfectly onto programming. When you truly understand a system, the code writes itself.
The Way of Kings
Brandon Sanderson
"Journey before destination." The process matters. How you build something shapes what it becomes. This is true in software, in writing, in life.
Avatar: The Last Airbender
Bryan Konietzko & Michael Dante DiMartino
Uncle Iroh's wisdom about choosing happiness over power, about finding your own reasons for being — it sounds simple until you try to live it.
Gödel, Escher, Bach
Douglas Hofstadter
The book about strange loops, self-reference, and the emergence of meaning from formal systems. Dense, playful, and endlessly rewarding on re-reads.
Talks
Inventing on Principle
Bret Victor
The idea that creators need immediate feedback — that the gap between thinking and seeing should be zero. Every good development tool I've used embodies this principle.
Papers
Open-Endedness: The Last Grand Challenge You've Never Heard Of
Ken Stanley et al.
The academic foundation for open-ended search. The idea that we can build systems that continuously generate novelty — not just optimize — feels like the real frontier of AI.
A Few Useful Things to Know About Machine Learning
Pedro Domingos
Clear-eyed practical wisdom about ML that cuts through the hype. "More data beats a cleverer algorithm" — the kind of unglamorous truth that actually helps.