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For the last ten years, when someone asked me if I eat healthy, work out, sleep enough, or read, I’d say, “Not as much as I want to.” Now that my kids and company are out of their toddler years, the hard truth is that I do all of those things exactly as much as I want to. In January, I realized I was chronically staring at my phone in the dead zone between my kids’ bedtimes and my own. So I swapped scrolling (or some of it, at least) for reading. No big plan or personal challenge, just an experiment. The habit stuck, and I haven’t read this much since college. I’ll spare you book reports and unsolicited advice on why you should read more. What I do want to share is my journey through an eclectic pile of books and the themes that emerged, from the perspective of a tech co-founder and father trying to re-build a reading habit.

I moved to the Boston area thirteen years ago, and it didn’t take long for me to find You-do-it Electronics, with its anachronistic neon sign shining like a beacon to electronics nerds driving up I-95. This summer, it shut its doors for good, which leaves me sad, even though I knew its closing was inevitable from the first moment I walked in there.

I loved You-do-it for its narrow aisles filled with connectors, cables, wire, multimeters, soldering irons, rack hardware, and countless other components for any electronics project. When I built out an A/V and networking rack for my house, at least part of my motivation for the project was an excuse to shop at You-do-it. When Paperless Parts moved into its first office, that’s where I bought our networking equipment.

What I learned taking one of MIT’s hardest graduate computer science classes (besides lots of math)

This past fall, I had the rare opportunity to take a graduate engineering course at MIT without being enrolled in a degree program. I knew a class would be hard, but being a student at the best technical school in the world, if only for a couple months, was something I had to experience. I talked to some students and recent grads, picked a class, and registered.