Understanding Our Culture, Part 1
Posted December 30, 2011 by Jeff Casimir
As part of the Hungry Academy planning I’m building several reading lists. The one I’m most excited about I named “Culture & Self for Developers.” The Ruby community is special because of the people and their understanding of the world, these are books that explain that ethos.
I’ve joked during conference talks that I’m better at buying books than reading them – and it’s completely true. First up are the ones I’ve actually read:
The Pragmatic Programmer is so classic. It is essential reading for any developer. This was the first programming-related book that I felt a real “connection” to; it shaped the way I think about the profession. Even though it’s twelve years old, the ideas are still current and important. Concepts so heavily emphasized in the Ruby community, like “Don’t Repeat Yourself” and the “Single Responsibility Principle” come out of this book. It’s a text that I’ve wanted to re-read and I can’t wait to discuss it with the program attendees.
The Passionate Programmer is very much a follow-up to The Pragmatic Programmer. I love how Chad Fowler divides the content into short segments that get right to the point. This is the kind of book that you finish and say “that was interesting…but it all felt like common sense.” The ideas aren’t ones that will blow your mind with their complexity or cleverness, they’re just simple and great. They should just be common, but they’re often overlooked.
One of the most exciting parts of Hungry Academy is that both I and the attendees get to spend many days with Chad, trying to make these concepts a part of our daily practice.
Can nine women, together, create a baby in one month? The absurdity of that question is the core of The Mythical Man Month. In software, bigger is not better and it definitely isn’t faster. This book does an excellent job of explaining why scaling programming labor is so difficult. One of the aspects I’m most nervous about with the Hungry Academy class is how to avoid these issues – how to make our team of twenty-four feel like a team of five, then how to integrate the twenty-four into the big engineering team at LivingSocial.
I was in high school when open source software started becoming mainstream in the developer world. As someone enamored with both coding and economics, I devoured books like The Cathedral and the Bazaar. It does an amazing job of explaining why we should care about open versus closed source. The economic and social arguments in this book are eye-opening for people accustomed to economies based on scarcity. When electronic reproduction eliminates the marginal cost of goods, the standard rules go out the window.
The Thank-You Economy, the second book from Gary Vaynerchuk, has stuck with me. The idea I continue to think about is this: in the olden days there were neighborhood businesses. If you give great service to the neighborhood, you’ll build a great reputation. Give crap service to just a few people and you’re reputation disappears, then you’re out of business.
In the 80s and 90s, mass-marketing replaced “word of mouth.” As people moved to the suburbs they stopped talking. Reputations grew through commercials, not genuine experience. All of a sudden, thanks to the Internet, we’re back to being a small, global neighborhood. If you give great service 99 times and crap service once, bet that one person is going to post a review on Yelp and chase your customers away. Genuine feedback once again rules over marketing.
If you ever get the chance to see Gary speak live, take it. This video from RailsConf is only a mediocre substitute.
Last but not least, Daniel Pink’s Drive is so insightful I can’t do it justice. Through my years as a classroom teacher I have significant hands-on experience trying to figure out motivation. Getting a high school freshman to care about their homework more than phone calls with their friends is a significant challenge. Everything I learned over those years aligned perfectly with Pink’s thoughts and research in this book. I especially love how he works in a thread about open source software and what it means for the future.
That’s it for now! The rest of the list is still in my “To Read” stack, but I plan to have them done before the start of Hungry Academy in March. Expect a follow up post with thoughts and highlights, but you can also see the full list on Amazon.
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