This page is a place for me to drop names and links to books, documentaries, movies etc that I liked and recommend.
Reading List
Some books I’ve read and liked
- The Grand Design – Leonard Mlodinow
- Relativity: The Special and the General Theory – Albert Einstein
- A Brief History of Time – Stephen Hawking
- The God Delusion – Richard Dawkins
- And Then I thought I Was A Fish – Peter Welch
- The Alchemist – Paulo Coelho (thank you, Abhinav & Shivangi)
- How To Win Friends And Influence People – Dale Carnegie (thank you, Dhananjay)
- The Third Wave – Steve Case (thanks, Abhishek)
- Siddhartha – Hermann Hesse
- Deep Work – Cal Newport
- Into Thin Air – Jon Krakauer
- Sapiens – Yuval Noah Harari (thanks, Yatris!)
- Predictably Irrational – Dan Ariely (thanks, Ayush!)
- 1984 – George Orwell (thanks, Ayush & Ram) – Completed: 20/6/18
- Animal Farm – George Orwell – Completed: 25/6/18
- Rich Dad Poor Dad – Robert Kiyosaki (thanks Kunal) – Completed: 30/6/18
- Zero to One – Peter Thiel – Completed: 15/8/18
- Politics and the English Language – George Orwell – Completed 16/8/18
- Wings of Fire – APJ Abdul Kalam – Completed 11/10/18
- The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck – Mark Manson – Completed 11/11/18
- The Selfish Gene – Richard Dawkins
- Tools of Titans – Tim Ferris
- Essentialism – Greg McKeown
- A Short History of Nearly Everything – Bill Bryson – Completed 7/11/19 (thanks Ayush, Ram)
- Atomic Habits – James Clear (thanks Megan!)
- Why the Germans do it better – John Kampfner (thanks Ed!)
- Man’s Search for Meaning – Victor Frankl
- When Breath Becomes Air – Paul Kalanithi
- How to make the world add up – Tim Harford
- How to be miserable in your twenties – Randy Paterson
- Infinite Powers – Steven Strogatz
- Ignited Minds – A P J Abdul Kalam
- Emotional First Aid – Guy Winch
- Understanding Exposure – Bryan Peterson (thanks Kunal)
- The first 90 days – Michael Watkins
- Selected Poems: Gulzar
- Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment – Amir Levine
- Tuesdays with Morrie – Mitch Albom
- The last lecture – Randy Pausch
Technical-ish
- The Mythical Man-Month – Fred Brooks (good useful insights about software development methodologies for programmers and programming managers alike)
- The C Programming Language – Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie (I read it recently, and it was enlightening. I understood why this book is recommended to aspiring programmers)
- Serious Cryptography – Jean-Philippe Aumasson (a very practical book to applied cryptography written from an implementer’s POV)
- Responsive Web Design – Ethan Marcotte (read this book before starting to work professionally as a frontend engineer, very clean; fun to read)
- Philip Roberts: What the heck is the event loop anyway?
- Javascript: Understanding the weird parts
- Learn Python The Hard Way – Zed Shaw (one of the best resource to start learning Python or programming in general)
- Cryptography 1 by Stanford on Coursera (taught me a lot about cryptography with formal methods)
- Hacking – The Art Of Exploitation (touches the topic beautifully)
- Cracking the Coding Interview (helped a lot with technical interview prep)
- The Pragmatic Programmer – A great book on effective software engineering, practical tips on how to focus on the problem and not get lost in the meta.
- Design of Everyday Things – Don Norman (general tips on human psychology that can be used to build great UXs)
- Don’t Make Me Think – Steve Krug
- Soft Skills: The Software Developer’s Life Manual – John Sonmez
- Automate the Boring Stuff with Python
- How To Write A Joke That Will Still Be Funny In Two Thousand Years – Ramsey Nasser
- A post-American, enshittification-resistant internet from 39C3
- On Unlearning with Dr. Ruha Benjamin – Mozilla Festival 2025
Movies
I get obsessed with certain movies from time to time.
- Wall-E
- Emperor’s New Groove
- Kung Fu Panda
- Before Sunrise/Sunset/Midnight
- The secret life of Walter Mitty
- The Shawshank Redemption
- How to train your Dragon
- My neighbor Totoro
- Lunch box
- 3 idiots
- The imitation game
- Rang de basanti
- Munna bhai MBBS
Blogroll
I feel like a really old person saying this (to be fair, I’m getting there) but remember the good old days of the internet when people had their little corners on the internet and they interlinked to other people’s little corners? Blogs are old fashioned, and blogrolls even older. Nevertheless, here are some blogs I follow:
- https://xkcd.com/
- https://simplysoch.wordpress.com/
- https://jagenau.substack.com/
- https://adikhandkar.net/
- https://blog.codinghorror.com/
Misc
I’ll paste here any random piece of internet content that I liked at some point in time.