Tag: Books

The Phoenix Project

I remember I got the Phoenix Project for the Kindle for free on a promotional day sometime back in 2013. I’ve been meaning to read it ever since. But back in those days I was suffering from the problems that the main character is suffering for at least the first 35% of the book. And well, when you can simply rename the characters of a book and relive the experience it is not something that helps.

I finally made it this week and got through it with some late night reading. Just like now that I am writing the post minutes after reading the last page. I am not going to rumble about the three ways or even the four types of work. By now this is common stuff and even some years ago, if you tried to read about Systems Thinking or even Cybernetics, you would have reached to those conclusions. But hey a story always imprints a lesson better than a textbook and this is so much better than The Deadline. You want to revisit The Deadline in order to copy the notes of Mr. Tompkins. You do not need to revisit The Phoenix Project.

Interestingly the book forms a career path for people interested to follow. It kind of reminded me of Putt’s Law and how you cannot postpone your promotions forever. I find it kind of optimistic careerwise, depending the location of the reader and there is still the question of the top floor.

While this is a novel about DevOps, DevOps still means different things to different people. Luckily this is a novel for all people for whom DevOps at least means something.

Speed of Dark

“If they aren’t going to listen, why should I talk?”

I learned about Speed of Dark from Katrina Owen on Ruby Rogues. The hero is an adult autistic in the near future who is working at a pharmaceutical company doing applied mathematics.

Most of the book is narrated in first person with shivering accuracy I might say. I never knew about Elizabeth Moon so midway I looked her up; she is a mother of an autistic. And the efforts to understand her son show. A true advocate for autistics, adult or not. And great parenting advice.

I really cannot write much about the book without giving away the plot, but it is all there: autistic education, effort to fit in, bullying, sportsmanship, search for love, search for meaning, tough choices. A really fascinating book and a touching story. And lots of music. With detail. And I keep thinking that I started the book while I paused Birth of a Theorem at a chapter full of music in order to reread it.

Speed of Dark will affect you regardless of whether you know of autistic people or not. It is one of those books that make you a better person.

The Art of Thinking Clearly.

This is one of the times that you buy a book because it popped at a trusted source. I bought “The Art of Thinking Clearly” because it popped up at the SIRA mailing list. So I bought it without looking much into reviews.

The book has an excellent start by discussing survivorship bias and an excellent ending after presenting 99 fallacies in a row and a well written epilogue. It presents counterintuitive thinking in a popularised form and it tries its best, but somehow leaves you wanting more. A typical failure when someone tries to explain mathematical concepts to the layman. Stop doing this people, especially when you are not trained into explaining Mathematical concepts. Because of the 98 fallacies in a row, which sometimes contradict themselves or even worse are stretched enough to be different between one another, it can be tiring to read it in one row. It is best that you take breaks and read other stuff after every two or three fallacies.

It also has some serious plagiarism issues that the typical reader can ignore if they like. If you want to treat this as a self-help book, you’re good enough with chapter 99: “Why you shouldn’t read the News”. The line:

news consumption represents a competitive disadvantage

sums it all up. At least for Greek media. But then again we already knew that.

Bottom line: If you understand survivorship bias and groupthink you’re not missing out buying the book. If you do buy it, it is not a total waste of time.

Social Network Analysis for Startups

[ Note: I’ve submitted this review for Social Network Analysis for Startups on O’Reilly’s site for the book also ]

The book is read very quickly if you decide not to work on the examples. Therefore it is a nice introduction to the subject, especially for people who do not want to go through Sociology or Graph Theory books.

It has very many typographical errors. This is the book from O’Reilly that I have submitted the most typos ever.

My major concern with the book is that although it uses NetworkX for an introduction to Social Network Analysis for Startups, the authors themselves say that NetworkX is not good for say 2000 nodes and above. And yet we are in an era where Startups get considered seriously after acquiring hundreds of thousands of users. And no the final chapter on Big Data does not really help out because it is not in the same pace as the previous ones. For example where would I go to find centralities for a 200K node network since NetworkX does not cut it? This is what the intended audience of the book wants in the final chapter. Or so I feel.

Remote: Office Not Required

I finished “Remote: Office Not Required“. It took me a bit longer than I expected, but I have more than three books open at the moment. I really liked the book. While one can find a rehash of ideas that exist also in “Getting Real” and “Rework“, I find it stronger. Especially now that I employ a quasi remote way of work. The most powerful message in the book is this:

For the remote worker, all that matters is work delivered.

So I guess, if you have ever felt as your work not being recognized, you have to try remote working. The book is about how to employ people working remote for you (and not blowing it up and therefore blame it on remote work) and for people that want to work remotely in order not to get lost because of distance. I spotted a few things that I do wrong; habbits that I have to change. Because this is what remote work is about: Installing proper habbits and corporate culture that can make it work. Working remotely and acting locally is a recipe for failure, so you need to read this book prior to starting any remote work program, or starting working remotely as a contractor or an employee.

ReWork: Change the way you work

I just finished reading ReWork by the 37signals gang. Normally I do not like books that teach me nothing. To that end I can say that I learned nothing new from the book, because I seem to agree with the authors almost every step of the way. Sure, there are details where I might disagree, but not with the big picture that the book draws.

I always have mixed feelings about such books. I agree with the authors far too soon when beginning to read them and this spoils the fun. I do not wasn’t to agree. I want to change how I think of stuff.  I am afraid of groupthink a lot I guess.

The truth is that if you’re planning to do a major change in your work life (and you’re a knowledge worker) you’ll want to read this. Mandatory reading if you’re planning to be the boss. It puts a lot of random thoughts you already had in the correct order. And that is the book’s advantage. It will only take you a couple of nights to find out.

Red Plenty

Following my streak of reading dystopic governance books, I just finished Red Plenty on the Kindle. The main difference being that this book is not about a science fiction dystopia, but about the Soviet Union during the Khrushchev era, where there was a real effort on competing with capitalists on their own ground.

And you know what else? The main heroes of the book are real, interesting people, like Kantorovich, the Nobel prize winner from USSR, one of the inventors of Linear Programming. I also wonder how many in CS have ever heard of Lebedev, a true computing pioneer whose plans were stopped by politics as it seems. People interested in Optimization will find great many stories to talk about. As those interested in Cybernetic failures.

Whether you are a socialist or a liberal, you need to read the book. Central planning fails. We know that. See some of the reasons why. Politics, mediocrity, privileged classes of citizens, blind faith in science and ways to trick the system bigtime, they all parade through the book. Go read the book. I want to thank @iamreddave for bringing it to my attention years ago.

One minor annoyance: In the Kindle version when you reach the appendix, there is a garbling in the paging. Apart from that you will love the Kindle dictionary. For this book I consulted it a thousand times maybe.

Agent of Chaos

In social orders, as in the physical realm, the innate tendency is towards increased entropy or disorder. Therefore, the more Ordered a society, the more Social Energy is required to maintain that Order, the more Order needed to generate that Social Energy, the two paradoxical needs feeding upon each other in an ever-increasing exponential spiral. Therefore, a highly Ordered society must gro ever more Ordered, and thus can tolerate less and less Random Factors as the cycle progresses.

It seems that I am on streak of books that deal with Democracy and other forms of Government. This was the second time that I read Agent of Chaos (the first being its Greek translation, 10 years ago).

Imagine a world where the US and the USSR have merged government and have managed to colonise the Solar System. This is the dystopia of the Hegemony of Sol which is governed by a Council of ten, five of them chosen scientifically by a computer and five by elections. In the Hegemony of Sol, a total surveillance state, what is not specifically permitted is prohibited.

Who can oppose such a systematic regime of absolute control? There exist two players. The basically insignificant Democratic League that fights to restore Democracy although they really do not know what it is and the resilient Brotherhood of the Assassins. The Democratic League was formed 10 years ago while the Brotherhood lasts for centuries.

The Brotherhood see themselves as agents of Chaos, and oppose the total Order imposed by the Hegemony by performing what seem to the Hegemony unexplained and unpredictable acts – but acts of defiance nonetheless. Can they or the Democratic League oppose the Hegemony? Will they change its police state? How? How, where and when one can defend against such a State is the picture that Spinrad paints. Is there any hope?

Yes there is, but the thing is that hope is not a strategy. So it is best that we do not let Governments slip into this dystopic model.

In placing Chaos opposite Order, I could not help but remember the Elric saga. I guess since Spinrad published in a magazine managed by Moorcock.

I must say that I really enjoyed reading this book on the kindle, although the production of the ebook is not without problems. Quite many spelling errors (at least enough to remember to write this). It seems like this was not retyped but OCRed.

PS: I am certain that anyone who has read the book would want Spinrad to have a complete edition of his Theory of Social Entropy as presented in the book by the fictive author Gregor Markowitz.