Risk
An annotated collection of 3 books & articles on risk, spanning 2005 to 2012. Featuring works by Robert N. Charette, Nassim Nicholas Taleb — each with editorial commentary oriented to digital product practice.
Why Software Fails
Charette compiles a catalogue of the largest software disasters in history — Denver's airport baggage system, the IRS modernisation, the FBI Virtual Case File — and extracts the structural reasons behind them. Most failu…
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
Taleb's argument that the events that shape history, markets and careers are not the ones we predict but the ones we cannot — rare, extreme-impact, retrospectively explainable events he calls Black Swans. The book disman…
Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
Taleb's central concept: some things are not merely robust (they resist shocks) but antifragile (they improve from shocks, volatility and disorder). The distinction is not semantic — it changes how you design systems, or…