Aiming to continue my book reviews, after Violet was born I’ve managed in the past 12 weeks to finish 1 book. Some people read that much in a night. Anyways…

Peopleware, it’s a book about software development, or so I thought. And while I thought it would talk a little bit more about technical aspects it was really a book the environment that is created for people who do software development and how to make that environment a good one.

It touches on some things that would border line on common sense, such as keeping the people working on a project together, trying to keep one person focused on one project, making sure that everyone has quite adequate space, realizing that building a team is hard and illusive, but once you have a solid team you really have something of significant value, and many other nuggets of wisdom.

If I can be so bold as to boil down this book (and its already pretty short) to an overarching concept, I would suggest that this book is about understanding the nature and triggers of software development and other knowledge worker jobs, and how they are likely different then other industries. And tackling this at a fairly low level. Like the chapters about furniture and space requirements. Things which are pretty easy to shrug off and imagine that they don’t REALLY make any difference.

The book seems like it’s aimed at fairly big institutions but I think there is still some application for smaller companies. While all the specific ideas don’t scale the principles seem like they would apply at all levels.

They brought up one area that I had to disagree with, which is the standing meeting. At my work we have a short 15-20 minute meeting to talk about what happened the day previous and what is planned for today, standard scrum style meetings. In my estimation these are valuable and not as the book suggests a ceremony to ensure that I maintain my overlord position. I think they’re useful because:

1. they create positive pressure regarding what people are working on due to each person (myself included) making a public statement about their intentions,
2. they allow an opportunity for helping each other if people are stuck,
3. they create general awareness of what the rest of the team is working on, which can lead to serendipitous opportunities to work together,
4. they help normalize the relationships by not letting anyone on the team avoid the other for more than a day and
5. they create a small bit of regularity and structure in an otherwise fairly unstructured day

Anyways, that aside, for someone in a software company and particularly having some aspects of management it’s worth reading.

The Light Fantastic by Terry Pratchett

I was reading the BBC list of top 100 books and noticed that Terry Pratchett had a book on the list “Mort.” Of course, when I went to the library they didn’t have it. Luckily, the Sir Pratchett has written a fair few books so I picked up the only one in my library, the Light Fantastic. The book is amusing. A few ridiculous characters and a fun, if somewhat equally ridiculous plot. I thoroughly enjoyed the animated and ever resourceful luggage character as well as the reality bending nature of the plot. A fun read.

Overclocked by Cory Doctorow

This was an interesting book of short stories. Stories of the future present was the tag line.  And I really enjoyed the various stories, a few were just waiting to happen which and a few which were clearly based sometime far into the future. It was fun to read a few musings of stories that are basically one step (or maybe less) away from happening.    Some of the stories, really grabbed me.  If you’re a sci-fi fan, and you like short stories give this a read.

Mort by Terry Prachet

Okay, okay two books by Mr. Pratchett I picked up the first Pratchett book left me wanting to read the really famous one. So when I got home from Playa, I did. And… it WAS pretty good. I think it is a favorite cause it has Death as a main character and the understudy Mort gets to play death for a bit which is equally fun. The concept is interesting to explore, I particularly enjoyed seeing the idea that people can only see what their minds are willing to believe play itself out to the Nth degree. I won’t give away any more snippets of the plot but like The Light Fantastic if you have a penchant for nonsense and turning a silly phrase it’s a good read. The most fun part of these books is the thoughtful bending of time, space and reality. There were a few snicker out load moments for me. And even I managed to enjoy the hero walking into a few awkward moments. Which regularly makes me squirm.

There is a lot in this book that I enjoy. He notes that the world resources are finite and points out that for a long time previous to industrialization no one really noticed this because there was always more world to explore, subdue and use/exploit/harvest. But as industrialization has come into full swing we’ve turned a corner where it seems that we’re able to use resources up faster than they regenerate. At this point the book has effectively defined Earth as a spaceship which we are the actors upon. And have the choice to act in the interest of reaching a place where we are living sustain-ably (although he doesn’t use that word) during this finite period of time where we have the benefit of relatively easily accessible resources.

He takes a few shots at people who resist automation, which is something I have thought about numerous times as well. The thought that always comes to my mind is that if automation is possible that frees the worker up to do more interesting work. The one trouble is that automation and capitalism is that putting people out of work definitely through automation rneeds to require some aspect of training for those people, so that they can continue to work at a job that is more interesting. ( I should think about that for a future post, I’m sure there are a ton of considerations I’m missing), but Fuller points out that this is a lack of faith in the creativity of humanity to find a way to survive and earn a living.

It is interesting to read predictions for what is going to be going on in 1985. Hint his predictions are certainly not all correct. But the admonition to do more with less and work towards a society and system of living that doesn’t require us to use the resources faster than the accumulate is still a VERY worthy goal.

I do have to say that the book uses quite an academic style of language to convey it’s points. And frankly I could do without that. I like plain language. Maybe it’s my vocation and training to not be terribly interested in complicating things with heavy language.

I haven’t read a lot of Fullers books but I have a hunch that there might be one that is out there that is a little more succinct but still captures his hey-everybody-get-out-there-and-do-more-with-less-while-we-have-the-benefit-of-our-current-resources attitude.

The book is broken down into thoughts (2 or 3 pages), which are collected together to make chapters on productivity, promotion, culture, hiring … Really tough to draw out highlights, everythird page is kind of a highlight, but here’s a couple.

Pouring yourself into your product is the easiest way to avoid trouble from the competition. Cause personality, that is hard to replicate and people want to feel like they have a real connection with some one.

“Making decisions is making progress” that’s one that struck me pretty hard. As I have a tendency to try and obsess over making the right decision. A like the idea of deciding doing and getting feedback quickly, doesn’t everyone? But it seems so often we get stuck making long long term plans which may or may not come to be and then having to change those plans later anyways, or they just get forgotten. We’re trying a one-page-plan strategy at work right now. Certainly keeps the plan short in length. Hopefully, it’ll also keep the plan front of mind and achievable. I’ll keep you posted.

One of the more generalized ideas I took out of the book, is that there are a lot of conceptions about what a great business is (and isn’t) and those guidelines might not fit your business at all. As a consequence, it is likely best to just ignore the preconceived notions about what a business ought to look like and just focus on what is right for this business. This kind of taps into my long standing dislike for the professionalization of everything (ie I’m not able to fix my leaking tap, I need a professional to do that… baloney!) and applies it to business. I like that. I liked a lot about this book, it’s a great tool for occasionally kicking one’s own butt into action. (Mr. Think #6 by eaubscene)

Winning, by Jack Welch. Jack Welch was the CEO of GE for a very long time (81-01), and during some pretty successful years. I’ve never really heard much about him, likely because I was still working my way through university when he retired.

The book is basically addressed to management types and aims to impart Jack’s experiences as a manager and the technique that he found worked well. Suffice to say that his experience was always with a company multiples times bigger than RevenueWire but hopefully the principles scale down.

So my three take aways from the book
“Strategy is just a general direction, then you have to implement like hell” Having done a few strategy sessions now, I do feel the weight of this sentence. The plan, even a great plan, is just a plan. It is going to require dogged effort to bring the pieces of even the simplest plan into being.

“Candor” – This is the quality of having open and honest communication with your staff and partners that is completely devoid of sugar coating. This is one that I am trying to take to heart. A change to simply be as positively straight forward as humanly possible. Leave no room for mis-understandings. Being a straight shooter might mean delivering news people don’t want to hear. But better to deliver bad news without uncertainty than to deliver ambiguous news and then later confirm people it (or worse, leave them hanging).

“Keep the hierarchy as flat as possible.” Jack recommends every manager should have 10 direct reports (or more if they are good). After some discussion, it was clarified, that in bigger companies the managers just manage. They don’t actually do any on-the-ground work themselves. That helped me understand. Lord knows with so many direct reports there really would be hardly any time left over for anything beyond simply managing the people. The thing that I did like about this idea was from the companies perspective it really does create enough resources (at least ten people) to be able to give the workers the time to simply work and (hopefully) not be subject to meeting after meeting doing metawork as the manager holds that responsibility. (Picture Credit to CanadaGood

The book had many other good nuggets, and plenty of anecdotes from Jack’s time at GE, which were quite interesting. If you’re interested in some fairly clearly written (and undoubtedly effective) guidelines for management, it’s a good read. Particularly if you’re part of a big organization.

This was the other book that I managed to plow most of the way through and then finish off on arriving home. It was an interesting read all about the changing way of the world, given the decreasing cost of working together and increased communication. The book looks at how people are using the web and using it well to do things that were previous to the web and social tools on the web impossible.

I feel like the central theme was this idea that we’ve made it easier and easier for people to contribute to various projects on line and as a function of that there are a) a lot of neat things that catch on and then acquire enough participants to do something useful, with most of the particpants putting in a little bit of effort and a few dedicated folks who are really giving it. Clay walks through a few examples of this that are pretty well known, digg, wikipedia, flickr where people can contribute a very little bit to the project given the appropriate tools and together make something that is really pretty awesome.

As a participant in a few of these systems it is pretty interesting to have someone do a deconstructive work on the social and technological systems that are at play in these new systems and start to personally get a better understanding.

A FEW of the topics that Clay picks up and runs with.

• It is way easier to find and form groups then it used to be. Wierd little groups can and (now) will for around any topic that you can think of largely because the interested people can find each other!
• The power law seems to rule the online world. There is always a few people who are very committed and contribute a LOT to any project and then a LOT of other people who drop by and contribute a little. Obviously the tools need to make this possible and in the end often it is the collection of small contributions that end up making the bulk of the work.
• In order to avoid the “tragedy of the commons” the tools need to make it far easier for the active members of any community to protect the good stuff that is being built then it is to destroy/vandalise it
• Transactional Costs are so much lower on the internet with many people contributing a little often for free that the cost of organizing or even trying to organize things are hardly possibe/worth it (developing a system of organization and then trying to communicate that system to all the particpants) so the tools need to make it very easy for people to organize things and then… it’s best to just go for it!

I left this book feeling like it was time for an ordained mission that I should start working on, using where appropriate all the tools that the book had highlighted. So I guess that means that book was educational enough to be inspirational. Not sure the author was going to inspirational… but there you go. Now to find the time and energy to get out there and get involved Ah the constant challenge.

The book hosts a good mix of anecdotal and applied theory for helping describe these social phenomenon that are getting to be the new norm. For anyone who is going to be working or developing a site online I would recommend reading this book.

Joanna had picked up this book a couple years ago and given it a read, and on our recent vacation I decided that this would be my fiction book for the trip. It was an intriguing book. The book tells the story of an autistic boy trying to solve the case of a dead dog he found in his yard. Through the mystery you begin to get a better look into who he is, and who the rest of his family is. In the end, the dog ends up becoming kind of a detail and the interactions between the people in the boys life become the interesting part of the book. And interesting it is. The relationships as seen through the lens of the autistic boy take on a simple and straight forward flavour that is refreshing.

I didn’t notice until nearly the end of the book but a LOT/ALL of sentences start with the words “And then” which does really give the book a style which I in the end suppose is autistic.

I do want think that I understand autism a bit better than I did when I started reading the book. Without really knowing too many people with autism and none of them that well, it is hard to say whether the insights are accurate. But it feels like I may have a slightly better understanding of autism.

I would recommend this book to others. It held my interest and in hindsight seems like it was both entertaining and enlightening.

In Defense of Food is a really interesting look at what nine tenths of the food in the grocery store is today and how we’ve been encouraged to give up the age old habit of cooking with raw food in favour of just warming up some pre-prepared meals in the microwave and calling it dinner. One of the central tenets of the book is that when reductionist science got applied to the food we eat, they succeeded in breaking it down into a series of bits and pieces called Nutrients and everyone was really happy. Because you could focus on the nutrients and there were guidelines that indicted that if you just got the correct amount of nutrients and you would be healthy.  Unfortunately, the first pass of reductionist science missed spotting that viatmins were an important part of ones diet, and consequently some of the initial experiments with food science had some pretty bad results.  How bad? Try baby food without vitamins.  That’s not good.

The book moves on to highlight a short history of nutritionist thought since it’s inception.  How the sweeping tide of current nutrionist science has painted one nutrient the bad guy and then shifted focus to another in the hopes of getting closer to keeping us healthy and in the consequently, helping creating processed food that does in fact make us healthy.  There’s definitely a link being drawn between, the people creating processed food and the folks who are doing the studies to determine what is healthy.  If I understood correctly, one of the points which Pollan strives to make is that the science’s understanding of what makes a body healthy is incomplete and the body has worked long and hard to deal effectively with the diet that had developed over centuries before we started processing food and breaking down and remodelling our foods after the current desires and fashions.  In the face of this incomplete understanding of food and how it interacts with our bodies we are better off to trust in the food culture that has been developed over the centuries.

In Defense of Food turns it’s eyes towards practical tips for what we should be eating.  The short version of the punch line is written on the cover of the book. “Eat Food, Not Too Much. Mostly Plants”  Then goes on to list a bunch of tips for how one might do this.  Most of the tips are pretty simple, like shopping around the outside of the grocery store, actually taking the time to cook food and eating slowly.  The tips serve as good reminders for what good eating looks like, and for the most part it reminded me of a lot of tasty dishes I haven’t had in a while.  I’m going to try to follow them as best as I can.  I’m still not ready to become a herbivore, but I’m completely ready to become a “flexivore” and slow down my meat consumption to a more reasonable level.

There was tons of information in here that had me raising an eye brow, fat might not be all that bad for you, that was a big one. In spite of all the information floating around *cough* Atkins *cough*, which I generally consider to be nonesense. I have to confess going through this book that I feel more inclined to eat butter rather than margarine with its trans fat infused past.  CAn’t say I’m doing the book justice here, but suffice it to say I would recommend this book to anyone who is slightly interested in learning more about their food!

Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth

The book covers quite a bit of ground, looking through the aspects of the debt and creditor relationship as they stretch back in time and relay how this framework is only really possible because humans have a sense of fairness and are living as a society where relationships are a necessary part of our daily lives. It then stretches into looking at how debt and sin are related and how sinfulness has been extended to relate to both the creditor and debtor. The idea that debt is only possible because memory is possible is opened up and poked and prodded and found that indeed debt really can’t exist with out memory (or accounting and ledgers).

Debt as a plot line is explored. This is a brilliant, if partially borrowed from Eric Berne, piece of work laying out how many of us are using Debt as a way to spice up our lives. In many cases, Debt may be used to add the story to the passing days of our lives. The subject is then spun out to a more national scale with some explanation of Taxes and how national debt works.

The book finishes in a somewhat dramatic twist by looking in upon the way that we as humans are in-debt to the Earth and how we are on line for some terrible times ahead should we consider to borrow on the large but diminishing reserves of Mother Nature Represented by the Spirit of Earth Day. When Mother Nature comes to collect you don’t want to be the one that answers the door.

Through all this Atwood has woven the stories of Doctor Faust, Ebenezer Scrooge (who gets a big role), Shylock (from The Merchant of Venice) and a variety of other classic pieces of literature which act as expected to glue together and fill out the presented ideas. Atwood touches in the church and Jesus and where they seem to fit in the story, interestingly pointing out that the church has really been focusing on the sexual sins lately and has let what used to be equally significant finance related sins pass away. She also presents an alternate scenario for 9/11 where the American’s choose forgiveness of the terrorists rather than revenge. (I’ve often wondered if the amount of money that has been pumped into the war efforts had been pumped into building up educational and infrastructure resources in Afghanistan and Iraq what would have happened in the ensuing years. I recognize that doing that kind of development would not be easy/possible in a hostile environment but it represents a different goal and I feel a better tactic.)

Both the Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth book and radio presentation are engaging and well worth the time.  While I can’t speak to how well it agrees (or disagrees) with modern thought on debt, the book ties together a lot of strings to provide a cohesive and well thought out (not to mention Canadian flavoured) look at the subject.

While I have spent some time in the metal working shop, I wouldn’t by any means consider myself an expert in the ways of metal work. There is so much to know, so many techniques to take a blob of metal and make into something useful.

This book is aimed at setting up your own shop and expects the user to have basic hand tool skills. By no means is this an engineers handbook, but more of a get-you-going-in-the-metal-shop book. The book is split into two main sections, the first covers working metal by hand, including soldering, brazing, drilling, filing, etc. The second half of the book focusses on lathe work and setting up a lathe (like the one pictures here “Stuart the lathe” by Elsie esq. in one’s own shop.

Admittedly this book, at roughly 150 pages, doesn’t have any hope of informing the reader about half the difficulties that one might experience in metal work but as a beginners book it does offer the reader an opportunity to get familiar with the basics. The projects at the end seem reasonably do-able which is quite encouraging.

My only beef with this book is that the lathe section at points is pretty hard to follow. Explaining lathe work in writing is clearly very difficult. A lathe is a specific machine with specific parts and describing how to perform a complicated operation really requires you to either be intimate with the machine or have one right in front of you as you read. I don’t really fault the author, complicated physical operations are hard to put into writing. But sometimes a little bit of humour and the occasional nod to the novice who is probably lost, makes the reader feel like the author understands some things are difficult to learn from a book.

As someone who is interested in metal work and more generally, engineering, I’m probably an easy target, but all the same after reading this book, my desire to give up my apartment dwelling and move to country, setup a metal shop, and start lathing and brazing has only intensified.