I'm very humbled and honored to be able to type this next sentence.

My friend, Buck Woody, sometimes gives me book recommendations. Except, with Buck, you have to understand, it's not really a recommendation. It's an assignment. There'll be a test later. You had best have studied. Failing, well, let's not discuss that, it's too terrible.

OK, I'm joking (mostly, not about the honored part though). Buck and I do share one trait, we get passionate about knowledge and we try to share. No denying, he's better at it than I am. However, I do my part. In fact, I'm here today to give you the same assignment, uh, homework, no, wait, reading recommendation, yeah, we'll call it that. Your new reading recommendation is to pick up a book called The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood, by James Gleick. It's a history of, well, information. Now, it goes beyond that, way beyond that. In fact, some of the math in a couple of the chapters had me floundering a bit (film school drop out here, be kind). Mostly, the book gave me a bunch to think about, but more than that, a few new tools for thinking about what we do. Not to mention a whole section on radios & CW (Morse Code), so I got my nerd on too.

In our jobs, it's really easy to get bogged down in the mechanical nature of data and database management. Did you test your backups? How do you capture detailed query metrics in PostgreSQL? Will AWS RDS run fast enough or do I need to look at Aurora? All terribly important, without a doubt.

However, there's a lot more to our jobs. Email, Slack messages, Teams. Web searches, LLMs, agentic AI. Frankly, an overwhelming glut of information. It can bury you. Or, it can be your savior. It can all come down to how you think about and use the information we have available to us (more than any other human on earth has ever had). That's the exciting, interesting, even funny, parts to this book. An understanding of where things came from, how, why, they were built, gives you more tools to deal with them. The book may, or may not, be a bit of a slog in parts, but I think it's well worth your time. So, if you haven't read it, get on that.

Oh, and my tests are far easier than Buck's and I grade on the curve.

Kidding!

Or am I?