Category Archives: Book Review

The word “optimist” in the subtitle is very well earned here. Friedman’s book explains why/how someone can hope that the same technologies and macro-trends that are leading to hyper-nationalism, extreme divisiveness, and massive pollution might actually be harnessed for good. He tells that story with his typical great story telling and insightful anecdotes. As usual […]

Jeff Bezos built a company that’s worth about the same on the stock market ($1.67T) as the entire circulating supply of Pakistani Ruppees ($1.68T). That means you could BARELY trade every Pakistani Rupee in existence for all the stock in Amazon. I guess I’ll read some of his wisdom and see what he has to […]

I rarely bother to post books I read for pleasure on the blog, but I thought that a lot of the people that I know professionally may be interested in this one. I started reading it in November when we were just starting to be able to think about what a post-Trump America might look […]

If you’ve read much of Gene Kim’s work you’ve heard of the transformation that HP Printers made to their firmware development process. Kim cites it so frequently because it is an example of one of the oldest software development groups around making software that’s some of the hardest software to test (printer emulators anyone?) transforming […]

I confess, Value Stream Mapping as a technique is something I already do with clients and I was reading this book mostly to make sure that I could say that I did (and now it’s on the Internet!). I will say that after being taught value stream mapping primarily as it relates to the DevOps […]

If you’re going to be working in technology for more than 10 years, you should read this book. It’s written by a set of economists associated with the Creative Destruction Lab at the University of Toronto. As you might imagine from an incubator with that name, they have made many investments in Machine Learning companies. […]

This “book” is actually a set of conversations recorded by John Willis and Gene Kim. The main thing I can offer by way of advice is; absolutely do NOT buy a printed version, this isn’t really a book. The book is apparently a inspired by a similar “Beyond the Goal” lecture done by Eliyahu Goldratt […]

The book bills itself as being for the CEO that’s looking to make sense of how the changes in IT should change the way they view the CIO and IT. It mostly lives up to that, though you’ll need to have some knowledge of agile/cloud. As a technologist, I also found it valuable to hear […]

This book has a clever punch line… “What can we as humans learn from computers about how to approach problems that face us in every day life? Get the answer from a psychologist and a computer scientist.” A clever side effect is explaining some of the more interesting concepts in computer science (search, caching, communicating […]