Books I read in 2020

I don’t recall why, but at some point between 2019 and 2020 I stopped writing on this site. I did not stop reading, though, so here’s a recap of all books I remember reading in 2020.

iOS Unit Testing By Example

Jon Reid’s iOS Unit Testing By Example teaches the fundamentals of unit testing on iOS through a series of practical examples. Some of the techniques explained have a somewhat opinionated approach, but that’s OK for me.

Its contents are solid and well explained, but they left me with a bittersweet taste after I finished it. Maybe because I was expecting more advanced examples that could help me in my day to day work. In any case, it’s a good resource for developers exploring unit testing on iOS.

Winners Take All

In Winners Take All Anand Giridharadas explains the following paradox: how is that despite their seemingly well intentioned efforts to have more equality and justice, some of the rich and powerful people in this world end up preserving the status quo and causing the problems they later want to solve?

I thought the book was going to be more provocative, considering its catchy title. But it’s actually an eye-opening description of how the elite think about the world and how sometimes they even see themselves as some sort of modern saviours.

As an anecdote, while not being the core idea of the book this sentence resonated with me:

If you think of the world as an engineering problem, a dashboard of dials you can turn and switches you can toggle and thereby make everything optimal, then you don’t always register the voices of people who see a different world – one of people and systems that guard what is theirs and lock others out.

It may sound surprising coming from a “techie”, but after all these years in the industry I still believe that technology alone can’t solve all problems our societies have.

El Colgajo

On January 2015 Charlie Hebdo’s headquarters in Paris were assaulted by two gunmen, killing twelve people and wounding eleven. El Colgajo (Spanish for Le Lambeau, the original title) is an autobiographical work in which Philippe Lançon shares how he survived the attack and his hardships in recovering from his wounds over the following year.

As disturbing as some of its parts were, I truly enjoyed reading this book. All events are always told from a human perspective, often moving, in what I believe was an effort by Lançon to make an exercise in catharsis.

If you’re looking for a detailed and engaging recount of the events, it’s probably not a good choice. But if you’d like to get a glimpse of the physical and psychological miseries of a surviving victim of a terrorist attack, you won’t be disappointed.