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What I read

Posted on May 13, 2009 at 22:36:36 by chris

I very rarely read any fiction these days; generally I'm more interested in learning something. Which doesn't mean I don't enjoy reading fiction - I'm just a lot more inclined to read a reference book.

The most recent (science) fiction I read recently was Second Paradigm by Peter J Wacks. I only originally read it because the author's a friend from high school, but I did enjoy it. Quick review: a very gripping, intricate time travel book, which I found hard to put down (though there were a few typos).

So what do I read? I'm ignoring mailing lists, some friends' weblogs, and news sites. I've recently found that some weblogs actually have interesting technical content, rather than useless waffle like this one. Most of the ones I've looked at recently are related to JIT compilers, one of my current favourite topics.

So some of the main things I've been reading recently include, in fairly random order:

Some print magazines:

• Circuit Cellar
• Electronics World

Some technical (we)blogs:

• Richard Boulton's Xapian weblog. I've had some small involvement in the project in a past job, and know Richard well.
• The PyPy status blog. PyPy is a very interesting implementation of the Python language in RPython, a subset of Python. They can then translate this interpreter into C, or JVM code, or (recent work) automatically generate a JIT compiler.
• Chromium blog. I don't use Chrome/Chromium, but there have been some interesting details on what they've done to make it fast and responsive (including the V8 JIT compiler).
• Andreas Gal - mostly about TraceMonkey, the trace JIT compiler to be included in Firefox 3.5.
• Neopythonic, Guido van Rossum's blog (the creator of Python)
• History of Python, mostly by Guido van Rossum again.