This post was sparked by Jofish posting about some of the material he’s preparing for his A-exams. In particular, he’s researching the process of evaluating and measuring qualitative experiences. Examples he used to illustrate difficult-to-measure phenomena included MySpace and texting, where users are not necessarily using these technologies in any way that was originally anticipated […]
The Career Programmer, by Christopher Duncan
Amazon link Another book from the Joel reading list. Subtitled Guerilla Tactics for an Imperfect World, this is a book by a career programmer on how to survive in the corporate world. Having spent eight years as a software developer in a variety of corporate environments, I was curious to see how much these tactics […]
The Art of Project Management, by Scott Berkun
Amazon link I first learned of Scott Berkun last year, when I followed a link to one of his essays and found it thoughtful and well-written. I started reading his blog, joined his mailing list. and kept my eyes out for new content from him. So when I saw his book, The Art of Project […]
Survival Is Not Enough, by Seth Godin
Book site Technically, this isn’t on Joel’s list, but he knows Seth, and several of Godin’s other books are on the shelf in the Fog Creek Library, so I’m counting it under a technicality. I happened to pick up this particular book a year ago in San Francisco from the discount rack in a book […]
Mysterious connections
Jofish was visiting last week and we had a fabulous time – at one point, we ended up at the screening of a short film that starred Jofish’s friend’s coworker’s sister. Afterwards, we went out with some of the folks that had worked on the film, and they were asking us what we do, and […]
Multiple social identities
Follow-up thoughts on identity inspired by Jofish’s comment that we each have a spectrum of identities ranging from multiple personal identities to multiple public personas, and an Economist review (subscriber-only unfortunately) of Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny, by Amartya Sen (see the P.S. for a relevant quote from the review). I should have […]
Remixing the private into the social
I really like this concept of identity construction being balanced between our private conception of ourselves, and the public perception of who we are. There are a bunch of obvious consequences that fall out of that split. For instance, when one’s desire to be maintain a certain social identity is strong, it can overwhelm one’s […]
A good night
Tonight was a good night. It started off with seeing Kid Beyond, live-looping beatboxer extraordinaire, at the Living Room. Andrew was fantastic live as always. Alas, the Living Room was too small a venue for him – it ended up being standing room only as we were packed in like sardines at the back, and […]
Direct from Dell, by Michael Dell
Amazon link I was kind of skeptical of this book when Joel handed it to me, but it was surprisingly good. It doesn’t have any original ideas, and didn’t change how I think, but the book was well-written (apparently by Catherine Fredman) and did a good job of describing how Dell had taken some basic […]
Identity Construction
I finally got around to reading Jofish’s CHI paper on archives a couple days ago, and an observation that really struck me was that one of the goals of archiving is identity construction. In other words, they observed that some people collected books and papers not to read them or use them, but merely to […]
