Books, Podcasts, & Other Good Stuff
Some of my favorites. This page is slowly being populated.
Last updated sometime in 2019.
Newsletters
- Morning Brew for well-written daily general news
- Bob Hoffman's Newsletter on ad industry
- Coté's Wunderkammer Newsletter and archives here
- Software Defined Talk Newsletter and archive here
- 5 Bullet Friday from Tim Ferris
- The Marketing < > Analytics Intersect Newsletter from Avinash Kaushik
- Andrew Chen's Newsletter, from an investor at Andreessen Horowitz
- Scott Galloway: No Mercy, No Malice
Websites & blogs
- Hacker News
- Seth Godin's Blog
- Doc Searls Weblog
- The Ad Contrarian
- Adbusters
- The James Randi Education Foundation
- The Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics, one of the best largely unchanged decades-old websites
- The Skeptics Society
- Quackwatch
Podcasts
- Making Sense (Waking Up) Podcast
- Software Defined Talk
- Tim Ferris Show
- Duncan Trussell Family Hour
- Akimbo from Seth Godin
- The Peter Attia Drive Podcast
- The James Altucher Show
- The Portal with Eric Weinstein
- The Astral Hustle with Cory Allen
- Armchair Expert
- WTF with Marc Maron
- Bill Burr's Monday Morning Podcast
- You Made It Weird with Pete Holmes
- The Genius Life with Max Lugavere
- Science Salon with Michael Shermer
- Revisionist History with Malcolm Gladwell
- Prof G Show with Scott Galloway
- The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish
Slack Channels
- Online Geniuses
- Magic City Tech
- DevOps Engineers
- Big SEO
- CRO Growth Hacks
- DevOps Chat
- Software Defined Talk
- Observability & Monitoring
- Chaos Engineering
- Kubernetes
Books, videos, & articles
Thinking, living, philosophy
- Exploring the Difficult w/ Mark Williams (mindfulness meditation) on YouTube
- This Is Water - David Foster Wallace on YouTube
- Make Good Art - Neil Gaiman on YouTube
- The 25 Principles for Adult Behavior from John Perry Barlow
- The Work of Byron Katie
- Non Violent Communication for improving relationships
- NYtimes on Auburn's Philosophy department
- The Great Mental Models: General Thinking Concepts
- Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind
- Letter to a Christian Nation
- How to Have Impossible Conversations: A Very Practical Guide
- Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models
- Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Awakening
- A Short History of Nearly Everything
- Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness
- Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress
- The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom
- Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World--and Why Things Are Better Than You Think
- Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion
- The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values
- Free Will
- Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment
- Finite and Infinite Games
- Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
- Be Here Now
- The Varieties of Religious Experience
- Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy
- The Conquest of Happiness
- Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature
- The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
- Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions
- The Inner Game of Tennis: The Classic Guide to the Mental Side of Peak Performance
- The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date
- Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World
- How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom
Marketing, management, IT
- Why Structure Eats Culture for Lunch on Safi Bahcall's website
- Seeking Global Maxima deck from Joshua Porter and insights on the same from Avinash Kaushik
- Seth Godin on Placebos
- Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It
- Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life
- High Output Management
- What You Do is Who You Are
- The Hard Thing About Hard Things
- It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work By Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson
- Trust Me, I'm Lying
- Making Websites Win: Apply the Customer-Centric Methodology That Has Doubled the Sales of Many Leading Websites
- Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less
- World Class IT: Why Businesses Succeed When IT Triumphs
- IT Savvy: What Top Executives Must Know to Go from Pain to Gain
- Real Business of IT: How CIOs Create and Communicate Value
- Building the Agile Business through Digital Transformation: How to Lead Digital Transformation in Your Workplace
- A Seat at the Table: IT Leadership in the Age of Agility
- BadMen: How Advertising Went From A Minor Annoyance To A Major Menace
- This Might Get Me Fired: A Manual for Thriving in the Corporate Entrepreneurial Underground
- The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change
- Content Strategy for the Web
- Content Inc.: How Entrepreneurs Use Content to Build Massive Audiences and Create Radically Successful Businesses
- Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content
- Responsive Design: Patterns & Principles
- The Halo Effect: . . . and the Eight Other Business Delusions That Deceive Managers
Tools & Resources
- ScreamingFrog SEO Spider
- EXP PLATFORM (A/B testing studies and methodology)
- SEOTools for Excel
- Notepad++
- GoodUI (A/B test experimentation library solving for replication)
- Das Mechanical Keyboard Model S Professional w/ Cherry MX Blue switches
- FileZilla free FTP client
- Copyscape & Plagiumfor checking plagiarism
- The Internet Archive including the Wayback Machine
- Help A Reporter Out (HARO)
- A soft murmur for those times when some white noise may help your concentration, but you want that perfect ratio of rain:wind:birds
- mIRC: Internet Relay Chat client
- Pagely for WordPress hosting
- SEMRuh for SEO research & rank tracking
Restaurants
A mini-guide to eating in Birmingham
- El Barrio intuitively the best restaurant in Birmingham
- Post Office Pies great pizza and other items
- Trattoria ZaZa for Italian food in downtown
- Rodney Scott's BBQ or Saw's BBQ
Advice
- Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by neglect, ignorance, incompetence, poor communication, or prioritization. - Hanlon's Razor
- Any sufficiently and consistently poor analytics data is indistinguishable from gaslighting. - an idea henceforth known as Watts' Razor
- Ask yourself: How am I complicit in creating the conditions I say I don't want? - Jerry Colonna
- If you think you are enlightened, go spend a week with your family. - Ram Dass, purportedly
- Model the behavior you want to see in your conversation partner. - Peter Boghossian & James Lindsay
- Happiness equals smiles minus frowns. H = S-F. Don’t care so much that you are going to frown. Let things happen. - The Woz