Nelson Elhage

Recommends rcmnd

• What they recommendrcmnd 13 things — each backed by an exact quote.

  Compiled by rcmnd.app, not by them: the quotes are theirs, and each links to the post it was copied from.

  Recent

  • Digital Apollo Mixed on

    I honestly don't recall that much from this book. I read it fairly early on in my Apollo exploration. I'd recommend Eyles' Sunburst and Luminary, above, as a better starting point if you're interested in the computers that flew Apollo.

    blog.nelhage.com 2019-04-08

    What others say about Digital Apollo →

  • First Man Mixed on

    I enjoyed it, and it got at more of Armstrong's personal story than I have seen elsewhere, but it was not especially memorable for me.

    blog.nelhage.com 2019-04-08

    What others say about First Man →

  • The Last Man on the Moon Liked

    This documentary was a solid telling of the story of that mission, and of the later-in-Apollo scientific goals and geological exploration that was achieved, as well as a wistful look back at the story of the last humans, to date, to set foot on the moon.

    blog.nelhage.com 2019-04-08

    What others say about The Last Man on the Moon →

  Show 10 more

  • Apollo 8: The Thrilling Story of the First Mission to the Moon Recommends

    This book tells the story of that decision, and of the work and the people who made that mission happen.

    blog.nelhage.com 2019-04-08

    What others say about Apollo 8: The Thrilling Story of the First Mission to the Moon →

  • Hidden Figures Recommends

    The book and movie only tangentially touch on Apollo itself (although it does appear!), but they make the list because they are well worth the read / watch, and they tell an important story of yet another facet of the immense collaboration that was the space program, and the incredible diversity of people and backgrounds and stories and kinds of work that went into making it all work.

    blog.nelhage.com 2019-04-08

    What others say about Hidden Figures →

  • Apollo 11 Mixed on

    It's well worth a watch, to see what it looked like at the time, but I also found it almost anticlimactic to watch: With the benefit of history there's no real uncertainty or tension about what will happen, and the format gives the viewer disappointingly little "behind-the-scenes" insight into just what it took to make the mission go off

    blog.nelhage.com 2019-04-08

    What others say about Apollo 11 →

  • Mission Control: The Unsung Heroes of Apollo Recommends

    I don't actually remember this one in much detail. However, as I mentioned above, Mission Control was the beating heart of Apollo and one of the most fascinating and critical components of the program, so I recommend it anyways.

    blog.nelhage.com 2019-04-08

    What others say about Mission Control: The Unsung Heroes of Apollo →

  • Thirteen: The Apollo Flight That Failed Recommends

    This book covers the mission and the details of the recovery efforts and the incredible work by Mission Control and by the astronauts to get the crew home safely after a catastrophic failure no one had even begun to plan for.

    blog.nelhage.com 2019-04-08

    What others say about Thirteen: The Apollo Flight That Failed →

  • How Apollo flew to the Moon Loved

    This is far and away the best general-audience technical documentation of the Apollo missions I've read.

    blog.nelhage.com 2019-04-08

    What others say about How Apollo flew to the Moon →

  • Sunburst and Luminary Loved

    The only reason it isn't higher on this list is that the content is a bit specialized and narrowly focused on the landing and the software and adjacent topics; it's definitely one of my favorite books here.

    blog.nelhage.com 2019-04-08

    What others say about Sunburst and Luminary →

  • From the Earth to the Moon Recommends

    This is a 12-episode HBO miniseries largely based on the previous book. It's also an excellent work, and I'd highly recommend it.

    blog.nelhage.com 2019-04-08

    What others say about From the Earth to the Moon →

  • A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts Recommends

    It's a solid, well-sourced ("based on hundreds of hours of in-depth interviews with each of the twenty-four moon voyagers, as well as those who contributed their brain power, training and teamwork on Earth"), general overview of the heart of the Apollo program. Also an excellent entry point.

    blog.nelhage.com 2019-04-08

    What others say about A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts →

  • Failure Is Not An Option Recommends

    This was the first book I read about the early space program, and I'd recommend it as a good entry point.

    blog.nelhage.com 2019-04-08

    What others say about Failure Is Not An Option →

  All 13 recommendations →

• Everything, newest firstFeed Repos, posts and recommendations from the cards above, in one stream.

  • nix-config — I guess I'm trying out Nix 3 Sept
  • nelhage-sandbox — Sandbox repository for experimentation and small toy projects 3 Sept
  • elisp — nelhage's emacs configuration 27 Aug
  • coop — A Coq playground 26 Aug
  • crossme — A collaborative crossword-puzzle solver 24 Aug
  • rules_boost — bazel build rules to use boost in bazel projects 14 Aug

  Show 35 more

  • llama — Llama is a tool for running UNIX commands inside of AWS Lambda. Its goal is to make it easy to outsource compute-heavy tasks to Lambda, with its enormous available parallelism, from your shel… 14 Jul
  • luawa — Experimental toy Lua implementation 3 Jul
  • nelhage.com — nelhage.com 17 Jun
  • dsync 15 Jun
  • arduinoproject — aggregator of random arduino projects 3 May
  • agemonia-reference — Some quick reference pages for Agemonia 16 Apr
  • blog.nelhage.com — blog.nelhage.com 23 Mar
  • From error-handling to structured concurrency 23 Mar
  • Solving regex crosswords with Z3 21 Oct 2025
  • The ITTAGE indirect branch predictor 4 Jul 2025
  • Performance of the Python 3.14 tail-call interpreter 9 Mar 2025
  • Building personal software with Claude 27 Jan 2025
  • Finding near-duplicates with Jaccard similarity and MinHash 3 Jul 2024
  • Stripe's monorepo developer environment 21 May 2024
  • Performance engineering, profilers, and seeing the invisible 18 Dec 2023
  • Advent of Code in C++ Template Metaprogramming 8 Dec 2023
  • What's with ML software and pickles? 8 Nov 2023
  • Graceful behavior at capacity 7 Aug 2023
  • Efficiency trades off against resiliency 15 Apr 2023
  • Transformers for software engineers 1 Apr 2022
  • A Cursed Bug 23 Feb 2022
  • Distributed cloud builds for everyone 31 May 2021
  • Failure Is Not An Option 8 Apr 2019 Recommends
  • A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts 8 Apr 2019 Recommends
  • From the Earth to the Moon 8 Apr 2019 Recommends
  • Sunburst and Luminary 8 Apr 2019 Loved
  • How Apollo flew to the Moon 8 Apr 2019 Loved
  • Thirteen: The Apollo Flight That Failed 8 Apr 2019 Recommends
  • Mission Control: The Unsung Heroes of Apollo 8 Apr 2019 Recommends
  • Apollo 11 8 Apr 2019 Mixed on
  • Hidden Figures 8 Apr 2019 Recommends
  • Apollo 8: The Thrilling Story of the First Mission to the Moon 8 Apr 2019 Recommends
  • The Last Man on the Moon 8 Apr 2019 Liked
  • First Man 8 Apr 2019 Mixed on
  • Digital Apollo 8 Apr 2019 Mixed on