Book: The Servant: A Simple Story about the True Essence of Leadership by James C. Hunter. Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️. This book was a big hit in Brazil for a while and of course, I heard about it in the past. I’m a bit skeptical about books that became a hit, so I didn’t pick this one. My sister asked me to buy this book for her as a gift and I decided to buy one for me too so we could discuss it.

Book: Radical Focus: Achieving Your Most Important Goals with Objectives and Key Results by Christina Wodtke. Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️. This one is hard to rate. I’m not sure if I liked it or not, and it’s probably related to the structure of the book. It starts as a non-fiction/business book, as I expected it to be, but out of nowhere, it became “a novel” (big quotes here). This “novel” part was not too bad, I liked it in the end, but it was totally unexpected.

Book: Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari. Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️. One of the best books I ever read. The amount of information here is huge. There are many things I did not know about the history and some possible explanations about where we came to the current state. I really like the way the author says “we don’t know this yet”. Sometimes, we just don’t have the answer but we have many proposed theories, so he talks about them and lets you reach your own conclusions.

Book: The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership: Follow Them and People Will Follow You by John C. Maxwell. Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️. I was between 3 and 4 stars and decided to go with 3 for this one. It’s a good book, I don’t have much to complain about it. Some “laws” seem to be fillers to me, but many make total sense. I would recommend it to someone, but reading a summary first would probably give you 80% of the value the book can bring.

Book: Meet the Frugalwoods: Achieving Financial Independence Through Simple Living by Elizabeth Willard Thames. Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️. I follow their blog for a while now and like it a lot, but I didn’t have the same feeling with the book. It was interesting to read that they felt themselves to be privileged when comparing to the rest of the population. Financial independence is not for everyone but frugality can be and that’s what they tried to say, IMO.

Book: The Power Of Less: The Fine Art of Limiting Yourself to the Essential by Leo Babauta. Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️. It’s a good book. It’s repetitive and a bit outdated (I heard Google reader somewhere) but all the hints here are still valid. To summarize: the focus is everything. Chose something you want to do and do it. Remove everything else that’s not moving you toward your priorities and do what you have to do.

I just bought an Atreus keyboard and I’m now configuring my own firmware. To do that, I’m using the qmk_firmware. I’m adding a new file as a layout (link here) and I have to change tmk_core/common/avr/bootloader.c to be able to compile it: -uint32_t reset_key __attribute__ ((section (".noinit"))); +uint32_t reset_key __attribute__ ((section (".noinit,\"aw\",@nobits;"))); After that, I just had to get the keyboard to the reset mode via fn + ESC (to change the layout) and then pressed the RESET button.

Book: It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work by Jason Fried. Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️. What a great book! The best part of this book is that there’s nothing so out of this world there, they are just talking about what we should be doing. Hey, it’s true, it doesn’t have to be crazy at work. We can still do our best and deliver an amazing product without making ourselves miserable working like crazy to meet some made-up numbers used as “goals”.

Book: Principles (Summary) by Ray Dalio. Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️. I was between 4 and 5 stars for this one. I would say I would rate it with 4.5, but when I was editing my notes I realized the big number of notes I had and decided to go for 5 stars. There are many good ideas in this book and many of the things I see here are logical. If you’re a logical person (instead of an emotional one) you will understand many of the strategies he describes in this book.

Book: 1984 by George Orwell. Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️. I was between a 4 and 5 stars for this book and decided to go with 4. The ideas behind this book are amazing, especially when you read a little bit about Orwell and the political scenario of the time. It is a criticism of many things but it’s still an interesting construct of what may happen in a very extreme scenario. The whole idea of creating a language to limit how people describe things and how they think is a really interesting concept.