2023 Reading Notes

What I read

Just a simple list, in no particular order. I’m not including links since they tend to expire anyway—searching by title is usually the easiest way.

1. High-Concurrency Systems in Practice: Clusters, Redis Caching, Massive Storage, Elasticsearch, RocketMQ, Microservices, Continuous Integration, and More
2. Systems Performance
3. Wuthering Heights
4. Design Patterns in Go
5. A Programmer’s Low-Level Thinking
6. The Age of Insight / In the Waves of Technology (浪潮之巅)
7. System Design Interview
8. The Vanished 13th Step
9. Deep Understanding of Linux Networking: Building Strong Fundamentals and Mastering High-Performance Principles
10. Illustrated HTTP
11. The Mobile Brain
12. Reflections on Xiaomi’s Entrepreneurship
13. BPF Performance Tools / BPF at the Peak (BPF之巅)
14. A Handbook for Self-Studying English
15. From Grains of Sand to a Tower: Building High-Performance Distributed Crawlers with Go
16. Principles and Practice of Deep Architecture
17. Modern Web Layout
18. The Non-Designer’s Design Book
19. The Philosophy of High Concurrency
20. The Flow Management Cube

The one that stood out most

This doesn’t mean the other books were weak. This one simply had the biggest impact on me and left the deepest impression:

Deep Understanding of Linux Networking: Building Strong Fundamentals and Mastering High-Performance Principles

If I had to pick a book of the year, this would be it. On the practical side, it helped me improve the most technically. Just as importantly, it explained difficult ideas in a way that felt genuinely approachable. It’s the book I’d recommend most from this year’s list.

The habit that pushed me forward

Using DailyCards really did push me. Presenting yourself will push yourself.

Compared with the idea of “output forcing input,” I find check-ins to be a lighter and more sustainable kind of output. Before, I often felt that “output” had to mean writing a full blog post. That made preparation feel heavy, and the more I prepared, the easier it became to procrastinate.

A check-in is different. You don’t need to worry about completeness or quality. It’s more like a short post than a finished piece of work. Nobody is grading whether your daily note is polished. What matters is that it shows you’re still making an effort.

Over time, a few things became especially clear to me.

Don’t obsess over interruptions

If I missed a check-in, then I missed it. If I didn’t study that day, then I didn’t study. That’s all.

Nobody is perfect. If I played games one day and didn’t study, so what? Because of that, I never developed the habit of backfilling missed check-ins. I’d rather show my real pace than create a fake sense of consistency. That also means there’s no need to get anxious about a break.

Of course, I still admire people who can keep learning every single day without interruption. They deserve the respect they get, and they’re worth learning from. But not reaching that standard doesn’t mean your own progress is invalid.

The hard part is restarting after a break

Do you know how recovery works after a soft interrupt in an operating system? The key is context.

That idea turned out to be useful outside operating systems too.

After several days of interruption, it’s very easy to keep delaying the restart. I do this myself. What matters most when getting back on track is not motivation in the abstract, but recovering your context by reconnecting with what you were doing before.

That can be as simple as opening the book you left half-finished, or replaying the video you stopped midway through. My own method is even simpler: I open my check-in list and see what I was doing last time.

That may sound almost silly. But often this tiny action is enough. Once the memory of the previous task comes back, continuing feels much more natural.

Going into the new year

I don’t really make New Year plans anymore. I’ve found that plans rarely keep up with reality.

So I’d rather finish the book in front of me and keep walking the path under my feet. Here’s to continuing in 2024.