Billie Thompson
This book falls into the category of business book I think of as experience reports.
Basically stories (often people building their own personal mythos) that tell their experiences of a situation. As this is the case you need to take this book with a big pinch of salt, as these “rebels” are people who largely inherited positions of power, and people in that situation often justify it as skill over luck. The authors of the book are a couple of people who could afford to take 10 months off work to wander around the world ticking off items on their ‘bucket list'. Cringe.
Having said all that, this book was fun, and while failed to provide any true depth to anything they talked about was well written, and I am going to use it as a jumping off point to read some more in this aread.
DNF, 25%
I wanted to like this so bad from the premise.
A lot of old person shouts at cloud. She has this whole thing where she thinks its ok to stalk people that don't want to talk to her. There's like an entire chapter on it.
A summary of her arguments:
* lack of communication causes conflict
* conflict leads to shunning as a first response
* Interpersonal shunning, leads to the invocation of the state
* Communication will resolve conflict
* Abuse is bad, and that we often use the term when there's not a power imbalance
* We should treat abuse and conflict diffently
* We have a responsibility to resolve conflicts in family and other social groups.
What get on my nerves is she doesn't really back up that shunning is happening, as a first response, her shunning model isn't one that matches any organisational behaviour research I know of, and infact individual relationships work differently than group dynamics.
Go read a book on non-violent communication rather than this.
There's a large number of studies on how the brain works, and how people learn. This book brings together these studies and suggests techniques and gives you tools to directly apply that learning to programming and software development.
It's worth noting that is does this without diving into agile, or CI/CD. This book is purely about code and the brains that it is understood in, which is refreshing.
I came to this book because I recently realised that not everyone finds naming variables so easy, and are there strategies I can recommend, which are based in some sort of science (which now that I type that out sounds pretty nieche).
What got me really excited though were the strategies for improving chunking and minimising my own cognative load when approaching understanding existing codebases.
If you don't know about the science of how our brains work when you are coding, want to make your own code more understanable, or want strategies in how to understand a complex unfamiliar codebase quickly, then this book is a must read!
The references are great sources too. Discovered a number of new studies I hadn't read yet, which is always a nice surprise.
Extremely well written, well paced and exciting. Felt very similar to the Martian. If you liked that and disliked Artemis, you'll love this.
I did like Artemis though, and this like the Martian still felt like a basically big empty universe with very few people in it, whereas Artemis felt cool and alive.
Fun but FFS, take the fucking magic test!
Other than that I really enjoyed this! I am going to get the next in the series, characters were well developed, had personalities and flaws, showed growth. The adversity was in proportion to life experiences, the only thing that made me eyeroll a little was how well liked and stable the MC was... buuut you know that didn't detract from the story.
Also I appreciated the LGBTQ+ representation!
Factually, it's fine.
From a entertainment perspective, it's a bit shit. It falls into the traps of using the predictable examples, and in a number of cases assumes the reader will be coming from the same perspective as the author, that is a white British man. It seems a lot like for a lot of the examples the author only has a vague notion of what the experience is like and he could have spent more time learning about these experiences before using them.
If you want a good summary of the big five and can cringe your way though some awkward examples it's not bad.
Good advice through a very specific lense.
So the science in it is good, as far as my knowledge goes, but it's applied through the lense of her experiences, which are not very intersectional.
The author is a Christian mother, and talks about that lot. When it comes to her advice it is always applied through the lense of being safe, i.e. not at risk of being attacked, and from a place of power in a relationship. The biggest fears she talks about are not being picked first for a sports team or her work being criticized.
If you are safe and in a position of explicit or implicit power I think this is a good book to read. If you are on the other side this book has a lot less to offer you.
Some of the studies in this book I already knew and she misrepresents them to be about listening, which they were not, in particular the Project Aristotle found that turn taking in speak in high performance teams was an effect of high psychological safety and not a cause of high performing teams. Psycological saftey is about ability to take social risks, not listening.
This is just one of but this is a constant theme throughout the book. It reminds me a lot of the unlearning podcast, where regardless of what the story was it would end with “So you had to unlearn a lot for that” every single time, regardless of what happened.
The actual techniques you can use in this book are the exact same ones she derides rubbish that “let you avoid listening” in the second chapter, mirroring, eye contact, repeating what the person says back to them, finding what excites them.
She also constantly talks about how politics could be solved simply by listening. However if you listen to minorities that are being persecuted, both sides aren't talking in faith. A great example of this is the meme “Sealioning” from the Gamergate times, where someone will jump into a conversation with persistent requests for evidence or repeated questions, while maintaining a pretence of civility and sincerity.
A deeply frustrating book.
I find Business books fall into two categories, psychological research then applied to business, or a group of tactics from a particular persons experience.
This is the latter, and because of it, if your organisations aren't like the organisations of the author, you might struggle to apply these.
Having said that, of the books I have read that are like that, this is by far the best, and takes a kind, learning and systems thinking based approach to most of the tactics described within.
The advice is practical and I can see myself using it as a reference. As it's from a collection of blog posts I would recommend treating each part as a single isolated unit, rather than viewing the work as whole.
Was entertaining but not amazing. It's got some good quotable facts. The practices from out are the “Noise Audit” where you find judgements in your organisation and attempt to measure it, and “Decision Hygine” can reduce it.
I probably couldn't give you a reproducable set of steps to do either of those things though. I think it's changed my thinking in one way, in that I now consider noise to be something to think on
This is of the deep in a single practice type of books.
It's ok, honestly I think you could work a lot of this out if you have read any more general book.
It's a good enough deep dive into the product roadmap, well written and with examples and anecdotes. It's just there isn't that much to say about product roadmaps.
Maybe a useful reference to fall back on if you get stuck?
The concept in this book is definately different. I would describe it as weird but not unpleasant. It's got the collection-y-but-with-relationships aspects of hareem (except with the cars?!), the levels of your classic litRPG, it's got cultivating, it's got sword fights, and it looks like it'll have spaceships and things in the future...
Characters get a bit of development, feels like they go to hospital an awful lot, and despite needing money, they never really /show/ that in any way. MC is magically good at everything. Despite that, it's got good pacing.
Entertaining action that's a bit different.