As a study of the human mind and a container of brilliant little anecdotes, this book deserves all of the credit it has received. Unfortunately, Kahneman doesn’t always bring things back to a central point, a place where you can absorb the information and take meaningful actions from it. It’s…
One of the most talented developers I’ve ever worked with recommended this book to me. A guy who, at least when a big financial is his client, finds himself arguing against documentation more often than for it recommending a book about requirement documentation? Figured it must be worth the read….
If you know me in the “real world” you know that I am a huge Pirate fan. The part of baseball I have found interesting for most of my life is player development. Watching players get drafted at 18 out of high school or signed at 16 out of Latin…
In 2014 I got much better about tracking my successes and failures thanks to both improvements in technology and my discipline. I intend to use these improvements in order to make my goals stick. This year I’ve added a few metrics under most of my goals and even created one…
2014 was an interesting year. I can only claim success on one of my four goals from last year, but I have good excuses for all and notable progress on 2 more. To recap, my goals were (here’s the full post if you want to see why I picked them):…
If you’re reading this because you’re a friend, or you have an interest in the Burgh, do not read this book. It’s quite technical and very dry. Even if you’re a techie there are reasons to complain about this book; many of the authors clearly aren’t native speakers and the…
There is a whole genre of books that have emerged out of the recent infatuation with tech startups; from biographies of Zuckerberg to about a billion cookbooks for success. I picked this one up because I think Thiel is an interesting guy, a bit Jobs-like in his belief that the…
The Pheonix Project is a novel about an IT manager that inherits an IT shop that can’t function without one or two key people, has deployments that are entirely unscripted and only quarterly, makes far too many break fixes and emergency patches, is buried in audit findings and basically sounds…
At Fannie Mae, I find myself in the new role of dealing with development projects. With this transition, I have tried to spend time learning about the techniques for managing development. My reading of DeMarco and Lister’s tomb on the subject is along these lines. The book is not…
Management is one of the best known texts by one of the best known authors in business. There were parts of this rewrite (although apparently a slight rewrite) and parts that I didn’t. It is, after all, a text book and few could be expected to like it the whole…