Recently enjoyed books, articles and other things
Hello all,
This is the mostly-monthly(?) digest for my blog. (I'm still trying to figure out my publishing cadence.) If you have thoughts, find me on Mastodon, or simply reply to this email.
My latest blog posts:
Reading and other things I enjoyed in February
I always enjoy recommendations of new things to read, watch or listen to from favorite bloggers, but I've never developed the habit of publishing any recommendations of my own. This is my first attempt at changing that. Let's see how it goes ...
Teenage Engineering and creativity (article)
I'm not a musician and I don't own any equipment made by Teenage Engineering, but like many, I have long-admired their approach to design. You don't have to be a designer or musician to appreciate how well they make absolutely beautiful, functional objects—the clean lines, the colors(!), the immediate tactility of it all. So it's perhaps unsurprising that I found this interview with the founder of Teenage Engineering on his personal creative space, as well as his his life philosophy around creativity deeply fascinating. In particular, I loved his take on slow growth and it's impact on product quality—an attitude we could use a lot more of right now:
Right now, there is a certain cultural fascination with fast growth, IPOs and so on, but I want to go slow, really slow and think long-term. It takes time to do good things. You see, this cultural phenomenon of speed and growth at all costs is displayed in every startup, they all look the same, it’s like fast food: it looks good, its taste it’s consistent but then you feel horrible afterwards.
Design systems and designer-developer workflows (articles)
I shared Josh Clark's Ship Faster by Building Design Systems Slower with the Spectrum engineering team at Adobe, and it elicited a strong positive reaction from several of my team members. Multiple people pinged me on Slack to express how much they enjoyed this piece. I'm glad. I've long-maintained that design systems are part of front-end infrastructure, and building infrastructure well means "going slow to go fast."
I also enjoyed Rune Madsen's take on how working with completely different toolsets is a source of friction between design and engineering teams in The Gulf Between Design and Engineering:
The most crucial mistake in the collaboration between designers and engineers happens when we conflate this division of tools with a need for a strong division of labor.
As someone who learned programming in Flash, which is a radically interdisciplinary hybrid programming-design tool, I have much more to say on this subject. Another time.
How Big Things Get Done (book)
How Big Things Get Done by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner which examines how big, complex projects—from major construction to IT to transportation to space exploration projects—succeed or fail at delivering, as promised, on time, and on budget. The book is full of fascinating stories on projects like the Sydney Opera House, the Empire State Building, failed home remodels, nuclear power projects and more. Slowness as a virtue appears as a recurring theme here too! Flyvbjerg and Gardner advise taking time with upfront planning, "thinking slow" and "acting fast" when approaching on new big projects. There's a lot to revisit here, and lessons to draw from that are directly applicable to software development.
Bluey (article)
Anyone who knows me well knows I'm fond of telling people why I think Bluey is by far the best children's programming in production today. If you're a parent you probably already know—it's a show that somehow manages to make you both laugh and cry in a mere 7 minutes. It was nice to stumble on an article that reaffirms my position, and so poignently articulates how they manage to pull this off in such a seemingly simple children's cartoon, time and time again.
Nai Nai & Wài Pó (short film)
Nai Nai & Wài Pó was a beautiful, fun, brief, weird, and totally unexpected reflection on friendship, family and aging. Definitely worth watching.
Parting quote
Life requires time and effort. That is to say, when we eliminate time and effort, we eliminate life's pleasures.
— Shunmyō Masuno
Some books I enjoyed in 2023
First, a brief digression on, what Alan Jacobs might call, the "pleasures of reading in an age of distraction."
Several years ago, when I worked at Madefire, I was out on a mid-day walk with one of my coworkers, ambling around the low-rise industrial buildings that neighbored our office in Emeryville, California when he admitted to me that he "almost never reads books." Instead, he said, he preferred to read only online content—blog posts, Medium articles, Reddit, and the like—because it was quicker to consume, more current, more relevant.
I didn't argue the point with him then (to each their own!), but to me the idea of biasing one's consumption of the written word exclusively towards the online is depressing.
Books remain my mainstay and most preferred form of media precisely because they are the antithesis of quick, current, and timely. They offer an intellectual escape from the noise and froth of the internet. Instead, books require time and focus; reading well requires a kind of slow immersion, a willingness to quiet the mind, to not flit about from topic to topic. You immerse yourself in the pages, saturate yourself in ideas and words, quietly slip into the mental space of the author. (Or abandon quickly if, after a little bit of sustained effort, this proves impossible to do.) Long-form text is intimate and personal. A well-chosen book should also have a timeless quality, content as relevant today as when or if it was written 50, 100, 200 or 1000 years ago. To sum it up, as Simon Sarris so eloquently writes (about books specifically):
Reading is alluring. It has a nameless quality beyond satisfying desires for information and pleasure. Despite more colorful and interactive media, reading text somehow remains more refined, more seductive.
So yes, I have a special fondness for books. I even keep a public list of books that have had a profound impact own worldview. I don't think anything I read in 2023 is going to make that list, but I'll share a few standouts.
All Things Shining
I'd been exposed to Dreyfus' humanist takes on computing and AI through his books What Computers Can't Do and Mind Over Machine—which are great if you're into philosophies of technology, and critiques of AI in particular—but All Things Shining is a very different kind of book, less academic, more readable. It tackles the question of how to find meaning in our age of infinite choice and little cultural guidance on how to make good life choices. It's something of a call to arms to live life with more wonder, more awe, more appreciation and passion, grounded in examples drawn from mythology, Western philosophy and literature. Traipsing through a variety of cultural influences, from Homer to the Bible to Spinoza to Kant to Melville, it shows how each offers something from which to glean on how to live fully and engage more deeply with the world.
I finished the book with a long supplementary reading list.
Wanting
Though grounded in René Girard's theory of mimetic desire, Wanting flirts with the boundaries of "pop psychology," something I typically disdain, but I actually enjoyed this book. It takes the theory of mimetic desire and explains it in a way that's engaging and approachable, attempting to show how it is applicable and relevant to everyday life. Sure, mimetic theory has its critics and might be overreaching in many cases, but for me that's not really the point of the book. What I got out of this book were two things:
- I should think much more deeply and critically about why I desire some of the things I do in life. This might seem obvious to anyone engaged in regular self-reflection, but this is a slippery and evasive activity. Mimetic theory provides one lens with which to approach this problem, and if you view it through with this lens honestly, I think you'll find it's a pretty decent lens in many cases.
- I should think more deeply about and better understand the personal motivations of the people I work with too. Why do they want what they want? How will that help me be a better leader?
The Prophet
The Prophet has been on my list of books to read for a long time and I finally made time for it. Regardless of religious background or standpoint, it's a beautiful, poetic meditation on life. You take from this book what you put into it, meaning that it doesn't really state anything novel or particularly profound, but serves more as a mirror to truths you likely already know.
As a parent, I found the chapter "On Children" particularly touching:
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The Archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the Archer's hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.
The Coaching Habit
The Coaching Habit often gets a lot of praise in engineering management circles, and now I see why. Such a straightforward and useful book, especially if you're a manager trying to develop and improve your team's self-sufficiency. The essence of the The Coaching Habit is a clearly-defined, step-by-step strategy on how to listen in one-on-one conversations and break the cycle of wanting to immediately jump in with advice or help. Why not offer advice in one-on-ones? Well ...
... in a nutshell, advice is overrated. I can tell you something, and it’s got a limited chance of making its way into your brain’s hippocampus, the region that encodes memory. If I can ask you a question and you generate the answer yourself, the odds increase substantially.
It's a quick read—basically seven straightforward questions you can use to coach people in working through their own problems. I use them all the time.
I didn't read enough fiction in 2023. I'll be course-correcting against my tendency to over-indulge in non-fiction in 2024.