Vicki Boykis's Blog

Favorite books of 2025

Another year where my technical content consumption outpaced the non-technical, and as a result, as usually happens, I’ve been feeling a lack of inspiration in my technical work. I strongly believe that if you do anything with code, you should be reading more fiction than non-fiction. Hoping to break that chain next year!

In writing these up, Ialso realized that most of these books are also not happy or easy books to read. I generally struggle through serious books, but all of these were enormously important for me this year.

Favorite books of 2024

Like last year, I spent a fair amount of the year reading code and technical books. Every year I have this struggle. There is a lot going on in machine learning and engineering and I need to stay on top of it.

Yet, I also need to read fiction because if I only read tech books, they take away my creative energy rather than grant it, as fiction does. Fiction allows me to understand other points of view, transports me to universes of inner lives and dialogues of people who are so very different from me. Fiction empowers and gives hope. I consider reading fiction critical to a well-balanced and open mind.

Favorite books of 2023 This year, I managed to read more than last year, but I was still pretty caught up in technical learning and unfortunately didn’t reach the fiction-non fiction balance I wanted (I always try to read more fiction than non-fiction.)Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver - By far my favorite book of the year. The premise is, “What if David Copperfield, but set in the 1990s in Appalachia at the start of the opioid crisis, and narrated by a modern 10-year old?

Leggendo Wohpe You can buy Wohpe on iBooks, for now the ebook here, on Kobo here, and soon on Kindle.There are very, very few people who are both excellent engineers and excellent communicators; so rare, in fact, that I can count them on one hand:Paul Ford, whose writing about technology was my first hint that technology is something you could write about in both a thoughtful and not serious way Paul Graham’s earlier works, don’t need to expound here, but I think about maker’s schedule on a regular basis Ellen Ullman, whose elegance in writing about how humans and computers work together is something I can only aspire to Maciej Ceg��owski, the founder of Pinboard, whose essays convinced me that data is as much of a liability as it is an asset, and who taught me how to write for technical audiences As someone who spends her life straddling writing code and prose, I am always on the lookout for technical people who are also writers, to see how they divide the time between technical work and writing, and honing this skill in myself as well.

Over winter break in 2022, my husband, my oldest daughter and I went to Argentina to see the country and visit my friend. We spent four days in Buenos Aires, the capital, and four in Bariloche, a small resort town that nestles the Andes foothills in Patagonia on the border with Chile.Our Airbnb in Palermo, Buenos AiresI wouldn’t describe the trip as relaxing: it was a really grueling flight: 2 hours’ drive from our house in Philadelphia to JFK, then 10-hour flight to Buenos Aires, and then another 2-hour flight from Buenos Aires to Bariloche, and all the way back again.

I have been doing so much learning and growing at work over the past year that I have entirely neglected an important part of my life.I am an avid reader, I love art, and I love thinking about technology as more than just code, but as an expression of humanity. At least, I used to. Every single brain cell I had went to learning this year. But in focusing purely on technical implementatation, I felt empty inside.

This year, just like last year, I got pretty distracted, both with the panedmic, and with work, which I did a ton of technical reading for. As a result, I didn’t get to nearly as much fiction as I wanted to.. But I still found a few really high-quality reads that I’m still thinking about as the new year begins.Piranesi by Susanna Clarke - I cannot overemphasize how good this book was.

Every week, I make soup for the family and it usually lasts 3-4 days. This week while I was on break, I made borscht and a couple people expressed interest in the recipe, so here it is, as best as I can approximate it.Most of the Russian recipes I make are very much based on guess work and basically watching my mom make them and then making them over and over again.

Reading was really hard going in 2020. I was home with two kids of a good chunk of the year and worried that the world was ending the rest of the time. When I did read, I wanted to read things where people who were competent solved problems. I didn’t want to read about (unattainable) travel or anything that felt like life moving foward, and I didn’t want to read anything about the apocalypse.

This started as a Twitter thread, but one of my long-time goals has been to not put stuff in Twitter threads, so here it is in longer form. Hopefully this is the start of a nice return to blogging for 2021!A few days ago, I was putting together our physical photo album for 2020. I do this every year because I’m terrified that I’m going to lose all of our photos into the digital ether.