Simeon Pilgrim

I purchased Outliers while in America this year.

Funny book buying story: there was a 20% off sticker of the jacket, but no price tag. All books in New Zealand have a price sticker on the back, as they are the US or UK print runs shipped here. Thus I was looking for the price sticker, when it dawned on my that it might be the RRP.  I then had to search the book jacket for the RRP (it’s on the inside front cover). Felt a complete nob.

Anyway the book is good, I had read some reviews/out-takes that talked about the hockey/football teams, so I was hooked.

I found the rest of the book to be as insightful. The key idea being that success is not just the efforts of the successful, but also not completely up to fate, very much along the lines of: life is what we make of those chances we are presented. To be a true outlier you need both (fate and effort) to go your way in large doses.

It also showed once again that there is no get-rich quick, no magic formula. Just people becoming great via hard work.

I read Why Software Sucks by David Platt over a month ago, and have been wanting to blog about it since then.

Firstly the book is so true,  as an engineer I love control, doesn’t everybody?

No is the answer apparently, and once I got this, I have noticed myself asking questions like, what if I’m wrong? or more to the point, what if less is more?

There where some great quotes in the book, I read a few out to workmates, and they all nodded their heads (testers/managers). I’ve returned the book to the library, so I cannot share them with you.

But the biggest win was a few weeks ago, when discussion a feature in a meeting, one of the testers proposed a different and really stupid ugly way of presenting a concept to the user. I started on my usual, pros/cons discussion. But now taking a less control freak perspective, I slowly found more winning points on his design, and in fact mine had discovery problems (the biggest problem actually), which as a in-the-know person all made sense, but how would we teach the users this feature, or allow them to discover it and learn it.

After a 10 minutes of talking, I said “you win” and he had not said a thing. I’m now ok with it, because I concivnced myself his was the overall better option.

So there you go, a great read, well presented look into software, the mindsets that developers have (me me me) when building software, and how they are not the same people that actually use that software.

The Christchurch City Library had their annual book sale on a few weekends ago.  I popped along, as it was held at the same venue I swim at each day.

The book sale is a two day event, and I actually went three times, first before my swim at 1pm, then again one hour later at 2pm and the last time on the Saturday at 1pm with my family.

The first visit was crowed, and the hall was full of trestles covered in books, one hour later half the books were gone, and the next day half again were gone. It was quite amazing, and also incredibly dirty feeling running your hand over the books to read the titles, while everybody else was doing the same thing.

Anyway, I picked up two books Programming C# 4th Ed by Jesse Liberty, because it was $2 and it never hurts to have a good reference book.  The other was Principles of Programming Languages 3rd Ed by Bruce J. Macleannan, as I really have been enjoying language/compiler books recently. Principles is a really good history of and why to it is that way type of book. A great read.