Greg's Blog

How Infrastructure Works: Inside the Systems That Shape Our World by Deb Chachra

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I loved this book! I’ve always been interested in infrastructure in a “isn’t that neat!” sort of way, and in reading post apocalyptic books about what happens when infrastructure goes away. This book doesn’t have a lot of nuts-and-bolts information about different kinds of infrastructure (although there is some!), but it talks about about what makes something infrastructure, why we should care about it, and what we can do to make it better. If you’re at all interested in infrastructure and society, I can’t recommend this book enough!

Here are some odds and ends I found interesting:
– Before Britain controlled India, people have estimated India’s share of the world’s economy was around 25 percent. After India gained its independence from Britain, it was down to 4 percent!! (pg 130) This is one of those times where I feel a little smug that the US has done a lot of bad things but at least we weren’t huge colonizers (with the notable exception of the Native Americans, obviously). In fact, Chachra points out that the 60 or so countries that celebrate their independence from British probably makes it the most widely observed secular holiday in the world!) (pg 136)
– Chachra points out that inspections and maintenance are important parts of infrastructure, but of course they’re not as exciting as building new stuff. (pg 174) I kind of relate to this – I used to be more excited about building new apps and projects and websites, but as I get older I’ve learned that keeping old things working can be just as satisfying!
– The colors of those little flags in the ground indicate what kind of pipe is underground: blue is potable water, green is sewage, red is electricity, orange is communication, yellow is natural gas, and hot pink is for “temporary markings” (pg 6)
– One of the dramatic changes as electricity became more widely available is the increased prevalence of light, which is something I hadn’t thought a lot about. In fact, New England today uses about a hundred times more light now than in 1888! (pg 26)
– Before the Civil War, trains in the North used “standard gauge” track (4 ft 8.5 in apart), while trains in the South used “broad gauge” track (5 ft apart). After the war, as trade increased, they decided to standardize on standard gauge track, and in 1886 all the broad gauge southern track was changed to standard gauge in a span of 36 hours! It took tens of thousands of workers pulling up rails and moving them slightly closer to each other! (pg 56)
– In Great Britain in the 1700s, navigators used the official time set by the Royal Observatory in Greenwich (which they needed to calculate longitude), but every place on land set their time independently based on when the sun was at the highest point in the sky. In 1840, railways started to use their own standardized time for train schedules and whatnot, which they kept track of by hand carrying chronometers on the trains. And 15 years later, the Royal Observatory started sending out the time by telegraph! (pg 68)
– Chachra talks about Dinorwig Power Station (commonly known as “Electric Mountain”), which is a hydroelectric power plant but also has pumped storage. Basically, it can store energy by pumping water to the top of a shift to a lake on top of a mountain, and it can harvest that energy by letting it fall back down to a lake on the bottom (and have it run through a turbine). It was built in the 1970s and can store 9.1 GWh of power! (pg 92)
– In the late 1990s, if lots of people in the UK were watching the same thing on TV, when that show or game ended many people would get up and plug in an electric kettle to make tea, which caused a spike in electricity usage! This was known as “TV pickup”, and operators at power plants could anticipate this and have more power ready as soon as the show ended. (pg 93)
– Chachra makes the point that she could go off the grid and have her own water supply, septic system, solar panels, etc. But this would mean she’d be responsible for operating and maintaining all of these, and in a real sense she would have less freedom in her life, not more. (pg 100)
– After recent hurricanes, more people in the US have died of carbon monoxide poisoning (from emergency generators) than from storm surges and flooding! (pg 102)
– Chachra points out that in the US we’re pretty good at providing “public goods” in the economic sense, meaning things that have a small marginal cost to add more people to (things like roads, water systems, and roads). But we’re pretty bad at things that have high social value but are not “public goods” in the economic sense, like food and housing. (pg 109)
– Chachra also mentions that as infrastructure systems such as water, sewage, gas, and electricity spread in the late 1800s and early 1900s, this reduced the burden especially on women, and it may not be a coincidence that this is when the women’s suffrage movements grew in parallel with these. (pg 114)
– People understood that widespread electricity availability was good for everyone, because it meant a lower risk of fires as well as less local pollution from burning things for light and heat. (pg 117)
– Solar storms are bad news – somehow I didn’t realize that a 1989 blackout in Quebec was caused by one! (pg 152)
– Locating buried infrastructure is tricky enough that there’s an International Utility Locate Rodeo! (pg 163)
– Chachra mentions the Austin boil-water notice in 2018 – I’m not sure I ever realized it was due to the heavy flooding that overwhelmed the treatment plant. (and apparently it was the first time Austin had a boil-water notice!) (pg 186)
– Our kids will hopefully live to see the twenty-second century, which is both obvious and mind-boggling to me. (pg 214)
– Heavy trucks (like 18-wheelers, etc.) are 1% of vehicles but contribute 25% of transportation emissions! Yikes. (pg 231)


View all my reviews

The Software Engineer’s Guidebook: Navigating senior, tech lead, and staff engineer positions at tech companies and startups by Gergely Orosz

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book is several miles wide and an inch deep.

The most useful/interesting part for me was how other companies tend to work with promotions and titles and whatnot. Since I’ve only worked at two tech companies I have a real lack of perspective here, and Orosz walks through a lot of differences between small startups, mid-size companies, and the tech giants.

I could see this as being useful as a jumping-off point to learn more about insert topic here – the book really does cover a ton of stuff, and sometimes you just need to know the right phrases to search for to learn more.



View all my reviews