Books in 2019 - Final Part

Gazettabyte asks industry figures each year to cite the memorable books they have read. These include fiction, non-fiction and work-related titles.

In the second and final part, the recommendations during 2019 of Analysys Mason's Dana Cooperson and Tom Williams from Acacia Communications are included.  

Part 2 of 2

 

Dana Cooperson, Research Director, Analysys Mason

I’ll cheat somewhat and go back several years when picking favourite books and then I’ll focus on titles read in 2019.

I’ve spent a lot of time over the past five years thinking about, helping my kids apply for, and paying for university education, so education-related books have been a focus. 

My first recommendation is Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life, by William Deresiewicz, an ex-professor and admissions counsellor at Yale. 

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Books in 2019

Gazettabyte asks industry figures each year to cite the memorable books they have read. These include fiction, non-fiction and work-related titles. 

Here are the choices of Cisco’s Bill Gartner, Sylvie Menezo of silicon photonics start-up, Scintil Photonics, and Andrew Schmitt, directing analyst at Cignal AI.  

Bill Gartner, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Cisco Optical Systems and Optics.

At the top of my list is The Gene: An Intimate History, by Siddhartha Mukherjee. Mukherjee does an amazing job of telling the story of the gene, providing historical context dating back to pre-Darwin times through to modern advances in gene therapy. The material is complex but he is great at describing the evolution of thinking about genes and progress in the genome project in layman's terms. 

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OFC interview regarding silicon photonics and our book

ADVA Optical Networking's Gareth Spence interviewed Daryl Inniss, director, new business development at OFS, and me at the OFC conference and exhibition held earlier this month in San Diego, California. We were interviewed regarding the status of silicon photonics and our book on the topic.

Click here for the interview.  

Books in 2018 - Part 3

More books read in 2018, as recommended by Steve Alexander and Yves LeMaitre.

Steve Alexander, senior vice president and CTO, Ciena 

I was standing in line at a Starbucks and was chatting with another person who asked what all these engineers were doing talking about networks of submarines. In fact, it was a nearby conference on submarine cables. The person said: “I thought that’s what satellites were for”.

I wanted to find a book I could point people to who think that satellites carry most of the international traffic when, in fact, it is the fibre-optic submarine cables that carry the vast majority of the world’s communications. I came up with The Undersea Network by Nicole Starosielski.

Our industry does such a good job at this that most people don’t even know such networks exist. It is like air; it is there and it works.

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Books in 2018 - Part 2

Some more books consumed in 2018, as recommended by Maxim Kuschnerov and Andrew Schmitt.

Maxim Kuschnerov, senior R&D manager at Huawei.

It is hard to believe the book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House by Michael Wolff was published in 2018. Judging by what has happened since Trump’s inauguration, this recollection of his first days in the White House seems outdated. But it was fun to read while the memory of the election was still fresh. It is hard to judge whether all the book’s sources are truthful but the main message is certainly not too far off.

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Books in 2018

Gazettabyte has asked various industry executives to discuss the books they have read in 2018. Here, Valery Tolstikhin and Alexandra Wright-Gladstein give their recommendations.

Valery Tolstikhin, president and CEO of Intengent, a consultancy

I read too many technical and business texts during the day so I leave my bedtime for more human reading.  

This year I wasn’t too lucky with fiction books but I did read some great non-fiction ones: Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari, Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos and Leonardo Da Vinci by Walter Isaacson. 

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Books in 2017: Part 2

Gazettabyte has asked various industry executives to discuss the books they read in 2017. Here, Infinera's Dave Welch and Deutche Telekom's Yuriy Babenko provide their highlights.

Dave Welch, founder and chief strategy and technology officer at Infinera

One favourite book read this year was Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow. Great history about the makings of the US government and financial systems as well as a great biography. Another is The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddhartha Mukherjee, a wonderful discussion about the science and history of genetics.

Yuriy Babenko, senior expert NGN, Deutsche Telekom

As part of my reading in 2017 I selected two technical books, one general life/ philosophy title and one strategy book.

Today’s internet infrastructure design is hardly possible without what we refer to as the cloud. Cloud is a very general term but I really like the definition of NIST: Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.

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