From Stock Markets To Ledgers, Part VI: Mechanical Sympathy

3 books to satiate your curiosity and ambition

What makes a Formula 1 Driver a World Champion?

It’s not hours of practice, or experience; Sebastian Vettel and Lewis Hamilton won the title when they were 23. And while having a father that used to be an F1 driver might help (like Max Verstappen, Nico Rosbergand Jacques Villeneuve), it didn’t help Nelson Piquet Jr., nor any of Jack Brabham’s sons Geoff, Gary and David.

It’s not money either. Ask Lance Stroll.

Being the occasional F1 tifosi, this is the question that I ask myself throughout the season. Is it you, or is it your car that makes the championship? Was Lando Norris really this year’s best F1 driver?

64 out 76 times, the driver that won the title was racing the car that won the Constructor World Championship. That’s more than 84% of the time. So there’s strength in the argument that the driver, in practice, doesn’t really matter. That Adrian Newey matters more than the drivers who race with one of his cars.

It might. But even if you have the best car in the grid, you have to at least be faster than your teammate.

And if it isn’t experience, nor the guidance of a father who was a driver himself, nor money, then what?

It must be the driver who can squeeze the most of the car he’s got that separates the good drivers from the championship material.

It must be the mechanical sympathy.

You don’t have to be an engineer to be a racing driver, but you do have to have Mechanical Sympathy.

— Jackie Stewart, 3 times World Champion

Mechanical Sympathy is an innate feel for the car. It’s being able to break at the right moment at every turn, considering the tires wearing out. It’s being aware of everything, including checking the flag on the side for wind direction.

If there’s such a thing as mechanical sympathy for engineers, most of us don’t have it. Even worse: many might even believe they have it, but based on notions about the underlying technology that are not true, or no longer so.

Which is why this article, hell even this whole series, came to be.

Over the last month and change, we’ve looked at stock exchange technology from the point of view of ledgers practitioners. In From Stock Markets To Ledgers, we’ve looked at how the systems at NASDAQ, NYSE or Euronext work, not to understand them completely, but to apply some of its takeaways to the building of ledgers.

And in this article, the last one in the series, we’re coming full circle. We’ve seen why fairness is more important than speed, why fault tolerance is about understandable code, and not simply correctness, and the four notions of time. We then looked at why AMQP failed, and I encouraged you to deploy to production every day with a CrossFit analogy.

The overarching theme behind this series is this: you don’t get to make better software products by mindlessly using what already exists, or copying what already works.

The moral of the stock market’s technology story is: the next generation isn’t built as a continuation. It’s a pivot.

Those who have a superficial understanding of the tech stack are forced to follow the rules. They’re vibe coding, even if they don’t use AI. Only those who understand the tech stack and its rules can change former and break the latter.

This is the path of those who want to achieve mechanical sympathy.

In this article, I’m going to look at 3 books as a way to approach the process of achieving mechanical sympathy.

• Why I chose these books over everything else (other books, online tutorials, courses, etc)

• How I approach the material

• What each of these books represent so that you can pick up your own reading stack

The books in themselves don’t matter as much as the process. Your path may be different, and so will be the books that you pick up. But feel free to start with them, and see where that leads you.

Let’s dive in.

3 types of books

Valuable books fall into three categories:

• DIY books

• From practitioner to expert books

• Exotic topic for the uninitiated

If you have a book that doesn’t fall into any of these buckets, throw it away.

I’m serious about this. We’re surrounded by books promising results in 21 days, or a week, or even in an hour.

Such books are based on the idea that feeling good is indistinguishable from being good. Deep down, you know it’s not. But it’s often hard to know the difference.

So here’s my foolproof heuristic for figuring out if a book is good: if it doesn’t feel like fighting Bane from The Dark Knight Rises, then it’s not valuable.

A good book is a wonderful way to increase your confusion and your stress levels.

Especially when it tackles a problem you think you know well. Good books go right into the kind of questions you never thought of asking yourself, and proceed to explain why you didn’t ask them, and what are their answers.

Good books are also practical. After reading them (really reading them), you’re a different person. Good books are akin to Neo’s kung-fu training in The Matrix.

A kick in the butt.

I am a student of money software. This means that I’m the most valuable when I learn from books about distributed systems that must be available enough while strongly consistent, provably correct, and auditable.

Which brings me to the three books I want to talk to you about.