You have been told a lie about job security your entire career. The lie is simple and seductive: if you work hard, stay loyal, deliver results, and keep your head down, your employer will take care of you. This lie persisted because it felt true for a generation that watched their parents collect pensions after thirty years of service. But that world no longer exists, and pretending it does is the fastest way to make yourself vulnerable. The employment contract has been rewritten, and most...

Every day, millions of people open a chat with a language model, type a question, and receive an answer that is almost good enough, but missing something essential. The quality of what you receive from an AI is determined almost entirely by the quality of what you send into it. The gap between a mediocre response and an exceptional one is not about the model you use; it is about how well you ask. This book is your guide to transforming that gap.This is not a collection of copy-past...

Every nation tells itself a story about why it succeeds or fails. Some blame geography, others blame culture, and still others blame historical misfortune. But these stories share a common flaw: they are wrong. Geography did not change dramatically between 1950 and 2000, yet South Korea raced past North Korea from identical poverty to become one of the most advanced economies on earth. The colonial histories of Singapore and Sierra Leone are nearly identical in origin, but their trajectori...

The modern marketing landscape has fractured across dozens of channels, platforms, and formats. A single customer might discover you through TikTok, research you on YouTube, read your blog, subscribe to your email list, visit your website, and make a purchase. Each of those touchpoints is a scene in a larger narrative. The question is whether those scenes add up to a coherent story or a confusing mess.This book bridges two disciplines that have lived in separate silos, customer jou...

There is a moment every builder of autonomous systems remembers. You wake up, check your dashboard, and find that your agent processed hundreds of items overnight. It handled edge cases you never anticipated and recovered from failures you did not code for. This book exists to help you reach that moment with confidence rather than anxiety.The term agent has been stretched so broadly that it risks becoming meaningless. This book cuts through the hype to give you a practical engineer...

Marketing has a complexity problem. Walk into any bookstore and you will find entire shelves dedicated to frameworks, funnels, and hacks. But despite all this information, most people still feel completely lost when they try to market their business. They are drowning in advice, paralyzed by options, and frustrated that none of it seems to move the needle. The problem is not that marketing is complicated; it is that the people teaching it have made it complicated on purpose. Complicated se...

Every software system eventually hits a wall. The database that handled everything now struggles under load. The replication setup shows inconsistencies that leak into customer-facing data. The streaming pipeline falls apart under production traffic. This book gives you the knowledge before you need it, not after.The five pillars of scalable systems, storage, replication, streaming, consistency, and observability, are not separate disciplines. They form a closed loop, and understan...

A fun-packed space adventure – with lots of funny details for little readers to spot, and a BIG fold-out rocket ending!Buckle up and blast into space with Ivy the inventor, and her trusty canine sidekick, Eddie...But when Ivy meets some very messy aliens, can she help them clean up their planet?And, of course, help them fix their super-duper hundred decker rocket?!A brilliantly inventive story with a subtle message about keeping our p...

A true story of three young men who came from a small town are given the opportunity to open a store in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania. A Head Shop. They've never owned or managed a store before. Two of them work full time in a tool and die shop and the third one is a senior in high school. See how they started in 1969 working together building a thriving business that surprised even their closest friends. It was a different time many things in the world were changing and they had to change wit...

A moving nonfiction debut by Mississippi Delta poet Mike Smith, this memoir-in-essays, AND THERE WAS EVENING AND THERE WAS MORNING: ESSAYS ON ILLNESS, LOSS, AND LOVE, tracks the loss of Smith's first wife to cancer after the birth of the second child, offering a portrait of marriage, family, and tragedy. In honest, and at times darkly comic terms, Smith documents the strange set of coincidences between his first wife's illness and his stepdaughter's similar battle the year his sec...

Gods walk among us.Indomitable, all knowing and long-lived, they guide us, nurture us and protect us. They are answerable to nobody, beholden to nothing. They are the High-Lords of the Imperium. For over five hundred years they have ruled over us, their Mandate of Heaven gone unquestioned.Until now.Only one man, Alex Grey, dared to rise up and challenge them. He confronted them and won, but in return they cast him from the heavens. Banished forever to an underworld,...

Most studies of 1960s jazz underscore the sounds of famous avant-garde musicians like John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, and Albert Ayler. Conspicuously absent from these narratives are the more popular jazz artists of the decade that electrified dance clubs, permeated radio waves, and released top-selling records. Names like Eddie Harris, Nancy Wilson, Ramsey Lewis, and Jimmy Smith are largely neglected in most serious work today. Mike Smith rectifies this oversight and explores why critical...