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Sunday September 26th, 2004
Clean teams and broken windows
Tom Peters blogs about THE CLEAN & NEAT TEAM! Applied to software this idea reminds me of the "broken windows" metaphor in The Pragmatic Programmer. I'm embarrassed to say that I had to do a Google search to find out which book it was in; I remembered the quote but assumed it was in one of Steve McConnell's books. So Google proved its worth, but it's annoying to have to use the web to find a book sitting on a shelf a metre and a half from the keyboard! But the silver lining is finding the coding horror blog and their mirror of the original 1982 Atlantic Monthly "Broken Windows" article.
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File under: Category Software Development, Category Blog Entry
Book Worm
The books currently grabbing my attention could be loosely grouped into the "soft skills" category.
Tom Peters is recommending two interesting sounding books, both with ridiculously long sub-titles:
- The Tom Levy book Accidental Genius: Revolutionize Your Thinking Through Private Writing. This looks very interesting, I'll probably order myself a copy.
- James Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations - Not sure about this one, I may add it to the end of my next order though.
Numerous people, including 43folders.com and Joel Spolsky have recommended David Allen's book:
- Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity. This books is known as "GTD" by its fans.
- Love Is the Killer App: How to Win Business and Influence Friends'' by Tim Sanders. - The sub-title could put people off! The book's about getting on in business by being a nice person, is written by a senior executive at Yahoo and comes recommended by Michael Hyatt - who seems to have his head screwed on.
Looking through the reviews and comments for these books it seems like I'm already doing many of the things they suggest. Either through being prompted by a different book or by my own modifications of other people's systems.
e.g.
- Mark Levy's "private writing" system has some seminaries to my own, much less formal, version of an "Engineering Notebook" as described by Watts Humphrey's in An Introduction to The Personal Software Process. That may sound a bit strange at first, as the two concepts are poles apart. In my version of the PSP I emphasise the "personal" nature of the process. Mark's book is obviously more wide ranging, and appears to take things to a much more personal and expressive level. This book is now on my wish list; I'll post a review once I've read it.
Obviously these are just my initial impressions, I may change my mind once I get my hands on the books.
File under: Category Book Worm, Category Software Development, Category Blog Entry