-- Geeks, drugs, and deception. An entertaining look into the (fictional) lives of techno con artists, and how a recently-fired comic book artist get pulled into their inner circle.
"
-- Particularly useful reference when trying to eek out a few extra milliseconds of load times in older browsers.
-- Interesting tech, and somewhat engaging, but disappointing ending (or lack thereof.)
, by Neil Strauss
-- An engaging, first-person account on transforming from an urban writer into "Jason Bourne."
, by Cory Doctrow
-- A high school hacker fights the 'Department of Homeland Security' to reclaim American civil liberties after anti-terror tactics are taken to a new level.
-- Techniques-for, and the value-of sketching interactivity before developing products. Good ideas. OK book.
" -- About finding untapped opportunities in your market and repositioning yourself to capitalize on them. Easy to grasp; Longer then it needed to be.
" -- A thin book with some good best-practices, but a little disappointing. Perhaps it's JavaScript's fault, not the author's ;-)
" -- Good overview of usability issues in designing HTML forms, backed by examples and eye-tracking research. I bought the 
" by Marshall Goldsmith
-- Discusses interpersonal skills (and how to identify and fix them) that most commonly hold executives back in their career advancement.
"
-- Lesson: Cut the corporate B.S. and stop wasting your time. Focus only on what matters most.
"
-- Lessons on handling tough conversations: firing people, relationship problems, hostage negotiations (well, maybe not that last one.) Wasn't an exciting read, but I've been paying more attention to "turning points" in conversations since reading it.
"
-- Lessons in building reusable ("pluggable") Django applications. Assumes you know the basics of Django and Python.
"
-- I really enjoyed this one. Lots of suggestions and strategies for negotiating.
I finished reading “Coders at Work“
The format of the book is a little unusual, in that it’s entirely interview transcripts. No analysis. No author-interpretation. Just recorded conversations. At first it’s a little surprising that one can publish a book like this; But then you get into the content and it’s wonderfully engaging. Analysis and interpretation would just get in the way of letting these folks talk. Reading direct quotes makes the content all the more exciting.
The book isn’t for everyone (obviously), but I rather enjoyed it. There’s some great stories about the history of our profession, and many topics raised that inspired additional research. (I went out and found a number of research papers referenced in the interviews, and bookmarked a lot of content for further exploration.) There’s also a fair amount on the history of different programming languages, and I have a fascination with programming languages, so it was a great fit.
A few take-away themes and ideas:
- While programming was no easy task in the early days, at least it was possible to fully-understand the hardware and all the software running it (as opposed to modern computers.) The modern computing environment presents very different challenges to present-day programmers, especially those new to the field.
- Even some of best use print statements.
- Passion and enthusiasm separate good programmers from great ones.
- In academia, you have time to think about the “best” solution, without the deadlines imposed on commercial developers.
- There’s certainly a component of “doing great work” that requires being in the right place at the right time — sometimes it’s just a matter of getting staffed on the right project.
- There’s some negativity towards C/C++ in here, mostly due to it’s negative impact on compiler and high-level language development. (i.e., one school of thought is that you give people a high-level language and make the compiler smart. The other is that you give people a low-level language and let them do the work. Unfortunately, humans aren’t so good at hand-writing code optimized for concurrency, but once you have a language that let’s them try, it’s hard to fund compiler research.)
Here’s a few of the quotes I highlighted while reading:
“One of the most important things for having a successful project is having people that have enough experience that they build the right thing. And barring that, if it’s something that you haven’t built before, that you don’t know how to do, then the next best thing you can do is to be flexible enough that if you build the wrong thing you can adjust.” — Peter Norvig
“…there are user-interface things where you just don’t know until you build it. You think this interaction will be great but then you show it to the user and half the users just can’t get it.” — Peter Norvig
“I get so much of a thrill bringing things to life that it doesn’t even matter if it’s wrong at first. The point is, that as soon as it comes to life it starts telling you what it is.” — Dan Ingalls
“…a complex algorithm requires complex code. And I’d much rather have a simple algorithm and simple code…” — Ken Thompson
“If you can really work hard and get some little piece of a big program to run twice as fast, then you could have gotten the whole program to run twice as fast if you had just waited a year or two.” — Ken Thompson
“if they’d have asked, ‘How did you fix the bug?’ my answer would have been, ‘I couldn’t understand the code well enough to figure out what it was doing, so I rewrote it.’” — Bernie Cosell
“You have to supplement what your job is asking you to do. If your job requires that you do a Tcl thing, just learning enough Tcl to build the interface for the job is barely adequate. The right thing is, that weekend start hacking up some Tcl things so that by Monday morning you’re pretty well versed in the mechanics of it.” — Bernie Cosell
“…computer-program source code is for people, not for computers. Computers don’t care.” — Bernie Cosell
“if you rewrite a hundred lines of code, you may well have fixed the one bug and introduced six new ones.” — Bernie Cosell
“I had two convictions, which actually served me well: that programs ought to make sense and there are very, very few inherently hard problems. Anything that looks really hard or tricky is probably more the product of the programmer not fully understanding what they needed to do” — Bernie Cosell
“You never, ever fix the bug in the place where you find it. My rule is, ‘If you knew then what you know now about the fact that this piece of code is broken, how would you have organized this piece of the routine?’” — Bernie Cosell
“Part of what I call the artistry of the computer program is how easy it is for future people to be able to change it without breaking it.” — Bernie Cosell
