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Book cover This is the second book that I've reviewed by Naomi Novik, the first was Uprooted.  At a high level, there are some parallels between these books, but they are definitely different worlds.  Here's a quick overview of the setting: A Jewish girl of about 16 named Miryam lives in a medieval small unwalled town with the name of either Pakel or Pavys, but the residents simply called it town which is a third of the way between two larger cities in the Kingdom of Lithvas....

Book cover This is book 2 of the Mortal Engines Quartet.  For convenience, here is a link to my review of book 1, Mortal Engines, which I posted a month ago. I'm going to start this review with a note about a changed name.  The books were originally released in the UK with a character named Shrike.  For the initial US release of the books, that character was renamed to Grike....

Book cover This is a different kind of book about business management.  This book is not about success, at least not an initial success.  Instead, this book is about continuing to succeed after that initial success.  It does this by talking very candidly about narrowly averting complete failure. The very beginning of this book does capture the early history of Pixar up through the release and success of Toy Story....

I was reading my twitter feed, when I stumbled upon this: If a process is broken throw it in the trash and start over. Nothing is set in stone. The simplicity of the tweet is absolutely true.  It totally reminded me of a problem I've seen multiple times though.  The process is rarely the difficult part of fixing a problem. A long time ago, when I was a team lead, the group I worked with had an automated build system that was extremely complicated, built entirely in-house, and didn't follow the conventions of any of the standard build-systems that exist....