Reading spree

Since I am on parental leave of absence, I have some time in my hands - I never could sleep during the day to recover from long nights. After finishing 'Don't make me think', I dug into Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days.
These are a series of interviews with the founders of some of the most successful IT companies. My personal favourites are:

• Steve Wozniak - Apple Computer - how a geek and his love for engineering and passion for perfection made one of the best computer products ever;
  
• Evan Williams - Pyra Labs (Blogger.com) - how he hung to the company and worked solo and for no pay after it went bankrupt, and how he finally managed to sell it to google;
• Tim Brady - Yahoo - fascinating story of the internet early early days;
• Paul Buchheit - Worker number 26 of Google. Shows some insight on the internals of Google;
• Paul Graham - Viaweb - Witty, funny, insightful, excelent writer. I recommend reading Hackers and Painters: Essays on the Art of Programming;
  
• Caterina Fake - Flickr - why and how you should adapt and evolve from your original plans;
• Brewster Kahle - WAIS, Internet Archive, Alexa Internet - the vision of one of the web messias. How you should have a long long (life long) term vision and stick with it;
• Charles Geschke - Adobe Systems - how competence and technological superiority beat big ones like Microsoft and Apple. How to evolve and invest to survive;
• Stephen Kaufer - Trip Advisor - My love for the tourism market...
• Blake Ross - Firefox - how a great hacker made a great product;
  

Don't make me think

I am no usability expert, but I always have been interested in what makes a good user web interface.
This book is for people interested in this subject but that, like me are not experts in the matter. It has good insights on web conventions and why they are good, simple rules on information architecture, navigation, usability tests, with a common sense non accademic approach.
My personal favourite is a chapter about what to do when your boss forces you to implement a bad idea. The author actually wrote serveral letter templates in which you can fill in the blanks, on where he tries to convince your boss on why some ideas are bad.

It's a delight to read, the writer is witty and funny and the whole book is very insightful.
Recommended.