A review of books I read in January 2019
The Tattoo History Source Book is a collection of primary sources, mostly from the 1700-1900s, documenting the tattoo culture of the indigenous people of the Pacific islands.
Each chapter is summarized and given context by Steve Gilbert.
I found this book very informative. It was full of great illustrations and photos of different examples of tattoo art. However, I could not help but wish it was more narrative, instead of a sourcebook with a lot of primary sources. Not all of that writing aged particularly well. It felt a bit like reading early 1900s weird fiction, but infinitely more dry and without the spooky monsters appearing in the end.
All the Answers is the story of Michael Kupperman's father, the once famous quiz kid Joel Kupperman.
I thought this book was honest and beautiful. Kupperman does an excellent job of capturing Joel Kupperman's neuroses. By the end of the book, I felt as if I understood where Joel was coming from, and why he acts the way he does.
I also found the information about jingoist war-time propaganda fun.
A Secret History of Twin Peaks is a novel in the style of a top-secret FBI dossier.
It uses the format to great effect, telling the history of Twin Peaks through news clippings, FBI reports, and tattered journal pages. All of which are annotated by the mysterious Archivist.
Did not think I would be reading a novel based on a television series... ever in my life. But here I am.
I thought the dossier format was fun. Some of the case files were a bit boring, specifically the turn-of-the-century news paper clipping describing strange goings-on around Twin Peaks. I can only handle so much kitschy fake-newspaper articles.
Additionally, too much of these books were just rote review of the events of the show. It felt like padding.
It was fun how much of the show these books tied together. Also, the typography, photography, images, and DESIGN in these books is phenomenal! It is fun to look at the patterns and images that adorn these books.
Finally, as a big Twin Peaks fan, I found the ending rewarding.
A Theory of Fun for Game Design is a classic game design book. The contents of this book are more academic and theoretical than a lot of similar books, but I still found the information within useful.
Each page of the book covers a different topic and is accompanied by a drawing illustrating the topic of that particular page.
I found it a great break-down of how our minds "grok" and iterate on games, why we find that fun, and most importantly WHEN we find that fun.
The illustrations were a nice companion to the text.
Blood, Sweat, and Pixels is a quick review of brutal game development projects over the last 10 years.
It was fun to peer behind the curtain on games I had played and wondered: WOW. What happened here?
Reading this book made the last 10 years of video game releases make a LOT more sense. I always thought Dragon Age: Inquisition was a weird, half-complete game.
I noticed A TON of parallels between game development and normal software development, especially in the "Stardew Valley" portion of the book. Software quality is never a big deal... until it is. Take this quote for example:
Barone had to spend all of his free time zapping the bugs that kept popping up. "It would be right as we were trying to go to sleep," said Hageman," and he'd be freaking out like, 'Ok, I just have to stay up and fix this,' and he'd be up the whole night"
...
It becomes a vicious cycle. Fans would submit bugs, and Barone would release patches to fix those bugs. Only to inadvertently trigger more bugs. Then he'd pull all-nighters trying to fix the new ones. This pattern went on for weeks. " I think success like that on your hands can be quite a shock," said Chucklefish's Finn Brice. "Suddenly, you feel as if you owe a lot of people a lot of things."Unit tests would have prevented this vicious cycle. And I have seen this exact cycle before: The author of the code-base feels too responsible for the state of the application, so they martyr themselves trying to fix it up. It is always hard to watch.
Key quotes:
The thing that makes scheduling challenging is iteration," said Rob Foote. "You have to allow for iteration if you want to make a great product." Iteration time was the last one percent...Markus believed the best way to make a video game was to spend as much time as possible in preproduction, which meant lots of talking, prototyping, and answering questions both big and small.Gang Leader for a Day is the story of absolute MAD LAD Sudhir Venkatesh basically joining an inner-city Chicago gang.
This book is intense and terrifying and sad.
Slaughterhouse-Five is Kurt Vonnegut's canonical anti-war book, based around the firebombing of Dresden during World War Two.
This book is beautiful. Vonnegut's wit and humanity and warmth hold your hand and lead you through the horrors of the second world war. Not to cast judgment, but to show you how stupid and silly and horrible it was.
When he lets go at the end, you look up from the book and can almost hear coda: "Poo-tee-weet?"
Urth of the New Sun is the final chapter in "The Book of the New Sun", Gene Wolfe's science-fiction epic.
I would try and explain this book, but it will just come off as gibberish. Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun is classic trashy science-fiction. I am a bit sad I am out of books to read from this series.
Basically, it turns out that Severian is god or something, and can travel through time? Who the hell knows.
All I know is, I love Gene Wolfe's long-winded, biblical prose describing extremely weird and dumb science-fiction bullshit.
As an example: The second entry in "The Book of the New Sun" is titled "The Claw of the Conciliator." It has characters named Baldanders, Vodalus, Dr. Talos, Dorcas, Sylveria, and the Chatelaine Thecla. Most of the book is dedicated to a fake play written in pseudo-Shakespearean Verse.
Accelerate is a data-driven analysis of the effects of DevOps and Lean software development culture on technology companies.
This book is VERY DRY. Its data-driven approach was appreciated. Not laugh-a-minute.
It is a great reference. It contains breakdowns of key concepts in the form of graphs and pictures.
Overall I thought the content was excellent. The research methodology is sound and it's great to have something I can point to and say: "This is what helps, this is what proves it."
However, the entire "Part Two" of the book was about the research methodology they employed in their research. I feel they could have cut out the parts justifying the research methodology and just given me the facts, and provided a companion website to justify the research.
Fundamentally, most deployment problems are caused by a complex, brittle deployment process. This is typically the result of three factors. First, software is often not written with deployability in mind. A common symptom here is when complex, orchestrated deployments are required because the software expects its environment and dependencies to be set up in a very particular way and does not tolerate any kind of deviation from these expectations, giving little useful information to administrators on what is wrong and why it is failing to operate correctly."As in other fast-paced, high consequence work, software and technology are plagued by employee burnout. Technology managers, like so many other well-meaning managers, often try to fix the person while ignoring the work environment, even though changing the environment is far more vital for long-term success. Managers who want to avert employee burnout should concentrate their attention and efforts on:
- Fostering a respectful, supportive work environment that emphasizes learning from failures rather than blaming
- Communicating a strong sense of purpose
- Investing in employee development
- Asking employees what is preventing them from achieving their objectives and then fixing those things
- Giving employees time, space, and resources to experiment and learn.
Last but not least, employees must be given the authority to make decisions that affect their work and their jobs, particularly in areas where they are responsible for the outcomes.Six factors that lead to burnout:
1. Work overload: job demands exceed human limits
2. Lack of control: inability to influence decisions that affect your job
3. Insufficient rewards: insufficient financial, institutional, or social rewards
4. Breakdown of community: unsupportive workplace environment
5. An absence of fairness: lack of fairness in decision-making process
value conflicts: Mismatch in organizational values and the individual's valuesGood lord. This book is DRY and TECHNICAL and LONG. I want a practical guide to weight lifting. This reads like an anatomy textbook.