For those in the software industry, DevOps is a word we have encountered in the past few years without knowing precisely what it means. It’s generally a movement to break down silos in between Development teams and Operations teams within organizations – all with an eye to enhance the business. In this work, Viktor Farcic interviews a bunch of people with the primary question, “What is DevOps?” They all center around this same definition. To…
Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is a classic that most high schoolers read excerpts from in high school. Burton Raffel here offers a new, full-length translation. The translation mostly succeeds (at least in oral format) as it conveys the sense of the work fairly well. While reading, it struck me how essentially medieval Chaucer’s setting is. While he is often talked about as one standing at the cusp of an enlightened England, his roots are thoroughly planted…
How does marketing work in an era where things go viral on the Internet and social media dominates our national discourse? Jonah Berger, a professor at the Wharton School of Business, has an understanding of how it can work and a philosophy of how you can use it to promote your work. Using terms like “social currency” and established concepts like social status, he describes how online marketing can work in a way that is…
Have you ever not had the right words to approach a situation at work? This work, from the Canadian Institute of Cultural Affairs, explains open-ended ways to approach conversations at work. It does so in a way such that the inquirer acknowledges her/his ignorance with a situation. This essentially post-industrial and postmodern approach allows teams of knowledge workers to appreciate everyone’s wisdom as they come to a consensus. This book is divided into two parts:…
This book’s interesting title spawns from the Japanese language, which serves as the nomenclature for the essential concepts conveyed in this text. This book communicates the concept of management which grew out of Japan, was popularized in the 1980s, and served as the philosophy for companies like Toyota. Management texts like this and Deming’s famous fourteen points taught and continue to teach the international business community about running better businesses. The philosophy of this work…
Techniques called “agile” comprise a more iterative approach to developing software. In many ways, it treats software as an open text instead of a fixed product. Agile development is used in most leading software shops around the world. This book treats a specific element of agile development – the retrospective. After each iteration or release, the team is gathered to discuss the last period of time and to seek improvement for the next time. This…
This work straddles the fence between a short novel and a book on business. It covers a helpful topic of five common dysfunctions of a team. Through reading it, I helped identify pits that teams I have participated in have fallen prey to. The story itself is relatively easygoing, if a bit short and superficial. A new CEO faces the scenario where her new form has more cash and more talented leaders, but is underperforming.…
Sanctuary, one of Faulkner’s early novels, focuses on the dark side of Southern society in post-Civil-War America. It is one of Faulkner’s more readable works. It’s a more straightforward crime mystery that is still based on the convoluted Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi. Like many (most/all?) of Faulkner’s characters, they appear aimless and uprooted from life. While in college, the daughter of a judge is raped and is kidnapped to Memphis. She eventually becomes a sex slave…
David McCullough is surely one of our country’s greatest writers of history, and he presents us with a jewel in his depiction of the Wright brothers’ great conquest of the air. As McCullough shares, the Wright brothers remained true to their project and true to themselves to the end. In so doing, they earned the praise of their hometown Dayton, Ohio, their nation, their sister-nation France, and the world. McCullough’s account is heavy on detail…
This book is routinely ranked by critics as one of the best books of the 20th century. It is a tale told by 19 points of view via stream-of-consciousness storytelling. If the reader can follow through the arrangement of the plot, it keeps the final twist hanging until literally the last sentence. The story is set in Faulkner’s famed Yoknapatawpha county. Addie Bundren is the mother of a family in rural Mississippi. She dies in…