GoodReads Summary: Hap Collins is a complicated man. He looks like a good ‘ol boy, but his politics don’t match. After way too many jobs, Hap has discovered what he’s best at: kicking ass. Vietnam veteran Leonard Pine is even more complicated: black, Republican, gay—and an occasional arsonist. As childhood friends and business associates, Hap and Leonard have a gift for the worst kind of trouble: East Texan trouble.

GoodReads Summary: A heretic thief is the empire’s only hope in this fascinating tale that inhabits the same world as the popular novel, Elantris.

GoodReads Summary: Data is at the center of many challenges in system design today. Difficult issues need to be figured out, such as scalability, consistency, reliability, efficiency, and maintainability. In addition, we have an overwhelming variety of tools, including relational databases, NoSQL datastores, stream or batch processors, and message brokers. What are the right choices for your application? How do you make sense of all these buzzwords?

In this practical and comprehensive guide, author Martin Kleppmann helps you navigate this diverse landscape by examining the pros and cons of various technologies for processing and storing data. Software keeps changing, but the fundamental principles remain the same. With this book, software engineers and architects will learn how to apply those ideas in practice, and how to make full use of data in modern applications.

After coming with a discussion about unit tests and layers, I got a bunch of other insights, specially from a video of Gary Bernhardt about "Fast Test, Slow Test".

On a recent discussion about testing, I think I came up with a reason why some people really think we need to test everything: they are thinking in layers, without even realizing it.

GoodReads Summary: Several months have passed, and Roland’s two new tet-mates have become proficient gunslingers. Eddie Dean has given up heroin, and Odetta’s two selves have joined, becoming the stronger and more balanced personality of Susannah Dean. But while battling The Pusher in 1977 New York, Roland altered ka by saving the life of Jake Chambers, a boy who—in Roland’s where and when—has already died. Now Roland and Jake exist in different worlds, but they are joined by the same madness: the paradox of double memories. Roland, Susannah, and Eddie must draw Jake into Mid-World then follow the Path of the Beam all the way to the Dark Tower. But nothing is easy in Mid-World. Along the way our tet stumbles into the ruined city of Lud, and are caught between the warring gangs of the Pubes and the Grays. The only way out of Lud is to wake Blaine the Mono, an insane train that has a passion for riddling, and for suicidal journeys.

GoodReads Summary: To celebrate the 75th anniversary of Will Eisner's most iconic character, Dynamite Entertainment proudly assembled the creative dream team of Eisner Award-winning author Matt Wagner, artist Dan Schkade, and colorist Brennan Wagner to honor the legend with an all-new adventure!

In my teens, I got two Spirit books on a sale.

I absolutely loved the story and the lines. It was my first experience with adult comics: Color only when really needed, deep story without a good vs evil (well, it was, but it was not all black and white), excellent drawing...

This is not it.

This is nothing like the original Spirit.

This is a sad rip off.

GoodReads Summary: While pursuing his quest for the Dark Tower through a world that is a nightmarishly distorted mirror image of our own, Roland, the last gunslinger, encounters three mysterious doorways on the beach. Each one enters into the life of a different person living in contemporary New York.

GoodReads Summary: A Cookbook with plenty of practical recipes for different uses of Storm.If you are a Java developer with basic knowledge of real-time processing and would like to learn Storm to process unbounded streams of data in real time, then this book is for you.

GoodReads Summary: The book will follow a step-by-step tutorial approach which will show the readers how to use Apache Kafka for messaging from scratch.Apache Kafka is for readers with software development experience, but no prior exposure to Apache Kafka or similar technologies is assumed. This book is also for enterprise application developers and big data enthusiasts who have worked with other publisher-subscriber based systems and now want to explore Apache Kafka as a futuristic scalable solution. (less)