Software engineer at PlanetScale and creator of the vim-go plugin; writes at arslan.io.
loved
This was probably my favorite book of the year. Gombrich wrote it in six weeks at age 26, aiming to explain world history to children. The result is remarkably readable.
His year-end post listing and reviewing every book and magazine he finished in 2025.
E.H. Gombrich’s A Little History of the World reads like a magical adventure that inspires true wonder as the reader journeys through our shared story on this planet.
In his Khan Academy blog post "Five Book Recommendations from Sal", listing books he has recommended to the Khan Academy community
Every entry is a verbatim quote and a link to the public post it came from. Nothing is paraphrased. If it is not on record somewhere public, it is not here.
The verdict is what they actually said: loved and liked are explicit; recommended means they told others to get it; uses means they only say they use it; read is a book on their public shelf with no verdict; mixed and disliked are kept too.
A dashed affiliate link, sponsored or their own label means the post disclosed a relationship. It is shown, never hidden.
The shading behind a date shows how dated a recommendation is for its kind of thing.
The shading behind a date shows how dated a recommendation is, for its kind of thing. Fully green is recent. It drains a quarter at a time as the post gets older, and is empty once it reads as dated.
What counts as old depends on the thing. A laptop praised four years ago has been replaced twice; a book loved twenty years ago is probably still loved. The shading is gone after about:
Hardware, services4 years
Software5 years
Podcasts, courses, other8 years
Books25 years
Stripes mean the post carries no date and the date shown is an estimate. No date at all, no shading.