Since getting my Kindle about a year ago I’m reading (and buying – go frictionless commerce!) more books than ever.   And because the Kindle is so convenient and I can read the same books on my Kindle, Mac(s) and IPhone it means that I generally read e-books rather than paper books.

However, its seems that I have defeated myself a little and should have read two of the paper books that have been sat on my shelves for over a year (since before buying my Kindle) and perhaps been that much ahead.

Number one is The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge:

Number two is Out of the Crisis by W. Edwards Demming

Obviously, I don’t know what those two books say exactly, but they have been referenced and alluded to many times in my last few readings (and viewings).

• Learning and Perverse Incentives, a great talk by Liz Keogh: watch at the most awesome infoq.com.  In this talk Liz covers several examples of management incentives and controls that have very surprising outcomes (and generally not very good ones).
• Surprising outcomes is a defining characteristic of Complex Systems as I learned from Thinking in Systems: A Primer by Donella H. Meadows.  
  
• I’m currently reading Management 3.0 by Jurgen Appelo which is very explicitly bringing together a lot of the systems thinking into context for managing software development teams.  
  
• Influencer: The Power to Change Anything by Kerry Patterson, et al. This book is full of real-life concrete stories of people who have transformed complex systems to improve the world.  The example systems include controlling the AIDS epidemic in Thailand, eradication of the Guinea worm in African villages and how the Delancey Street Foundation has helped rehabilitate 90% of its residents.  This book really exemplifies ‘dancing with a system’ to enact change, rather than trying to constrain and control a system and Shifting the Burden to the Intervenor. 
  

Whilst researching this post I stumbled on another book that is familiar to me, but only because I’ve intended to purchase it for several years, but for some reason I haven’t, which is surprising considering it’s written by the very astute Gerald M. Weinberg: An Introduction to General Systems Thinking.

I suppose that is now more fodder for my Kindle (and my brain): once I’ve read the two paper books, obviously.

So as most things are complex systems I suppose it’s likely that my reading converging on complex systems is perhaps an emergent property of one of the systems I am an element in.

Disclaimer: I’m no carpenter

Just like software patterns, carpentry joints aren’t a drop in solution.  Joints are a well understood carpentry pattern but they still must be used in context.  The type of wood being joined constrains the joint you can use, the desired appearance constrains which joints can be used, the use of the jointed pieces further constrains the choice of joint.  Further, the thickness of the wood will determine the size of the dovetails for example.  The constraints go on an on.

The difference between carpentry and software development is that the understanding of which joint to choose has been developed and refined by master craftsmen for thousands of years!  You can now buy laminate flooring that just clicks together – but it took the legacy of many, many craftsman hours to make that a possibility.

The take away for me is the re-enforcement of the truth: we’re still the software pioneers.  We’re still lashing bits of code together with rope, we can’t quite get a catalog of time-tested, tried and true joints.  We know enough to know there must be better ways of doing things, we just don’t have a clue of what they are yet.

Software development might just be about pioneer spirit, and anyone who tells you they’ve got it sorted is probably trying to sell snake oil to the prospectors.

[1] Image used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Licence – Author: Dumitru Rotari

A lot of the content in PTL wasn’t that new to me, as I have previously read several of the books that Andy has read and references from the text.  That said, I definitely learned new things and deepened my understanding about certain areas.

Constant learning is definitely a incredibly valuable thing, I look for it in every potential new hire I interview.  But continually learning in the same habitual way may not be the optimal strategy.  If you apply the agile development approaches to how we learn it suggests that you should retrospect at what works, what doesn’t and that we should be prepared to try different things to see if they work better (rinse and repeat).

Though I’m not a novice at learning, I am a novice at learning using new tools and techniques: when was the last time you learned how to learn in a new way?  So how do I move froward from here?  According to the book, what I need is some novice/advanced beginner handrails to hold whilst I improve.  Different to the other books that I have read around this subject, PTL brings a consolidated set of next-steps in the context of the life of a software developer.

This is the initial list of things I am going to start:

• Read more deliberately using the SQR3 technique, then blog about what I have learned.
  • Read PTL again, this time, read it deliberately.
  • Re-read Domain-Driven Design deliberately.
• Increase my blogging frequency – hopefully doing more often will make me quicker.
• Review my blog posts once in a while – do I still agree? what have I learned since?
• Try mindmaps again having deepened my understanding about how they might help me learn/understand.
  • Redraw mindmaps every now and then – let some mental mushing happen – see what my brain has subconsciously come up with.

Ever more things will come up as I continually learn and continually learn to learn.  I’m still on that journey that started the best part of 33 years ago and one that I hope doesn’t stop for a very long time yet.

I got from it pretty much what I was hoping: an easily digestible introduction into Objective-C.  I had previously read a bunch on the web, but I always find reading books, rather than reading a screen, to be far more effective for myself.  I had many different questions answered from an attempted iPhone coding session a few months ago.

I have been nudging some of the guys at work to start an Objective-C/iPhone/Mac programming study group. This book will be very useful for the novices in the group (myself included) to quickly look up the fundamentals and work through the syntax impedance as they try and push a new language into their Java brains – this was definitely a sticking point with the Erlang study group we had for a while.

In summary, a great, concise reference – just like the title suggests.  It appears that the reviewers on Amazon also agree.