July 18, 2021

A Guide to Navigating the Unpredictable

Hi friends.

Welcome to the second newsletter via Substack. My very brief report on Substack: super easy to use and well designed. There are far fewer hoops to jump through that on Mailchimp, but Mailchimp was not designed for newsletters again.

New piece up this Sunday morning: Ask for Help1. For the past couple of years, I’ve been doing speaking gigs where I went to college, UCSC. These visits trigger memories of the years I spent there as well as the lessons. This started with Going Full Pascal and continues with Ask for Help. All things come in threes, which means I have a third piece partially drafted currently called Chunk. Stay tuned.

In other Rands news, I signed a contract with O’Reilly to reboot the second book Being Geek. The title of this book came from a talk I did years ago at Webstock, and the thought was to diverge from leadership and more towards career management. Problem was: that’s not what the title solid. Oops.

The new title: “The Software Developer’s Career Handbook: A Guide to Navigating the Unpredictable.” I’ll be adding ten chapters, removing the garbage, freshening the rest. I’m sure there will be pandemic chapters, too. Fun fact: the idea to reboot the book came from a discussion over at Rands Leadership Slack. The Slack that keeps on giving

Reboot lands next fall. Still haven’t seen the cover for the fourth edition of Managing Humans which is coming out this Fall, but here’s a quote I received this week from John Dickerson for the cover:

It is so satisfying to read the work of an author who articulates something we know, but can’t put our finger on, and then answers the excitement of fresh revelation with useful solutions or a frame to think about what we’ve just learned—all done in a breezy, knowing prose, that invites you to constantly write margin notes to capture the new thinking it invites. 

Aw.

Hope you are happy and healthy.

Rands.