Indie – Scott J. Pearson’s Book Review

The Executive Mindset: Unlocking the Strategic Power Inside Every Manager

By Scott J. Pearson | June 21, 2026June 21, 2026 by Scott J. Pearson

Learning to think like the “next level up” is a challenge in any professional group. As the saying goes, what got you here isn’t going to get you there. The gap between management and leadership remains large. As you move up an organization’s chart, mentoring is harder to come by and free passes to make mistakes become fewer. Reading books like Bobby Lampkin’s provide opportunities to level up your thinking and behavior to bring further…

Indie Writing-Communication

Narrative is Everything: The ABT Framework & Narrative Evolution

By Scott J. Pearson | June 9, 2026June 9, 2026 by Scott J. Pearson

Randy Olson spent half of his career as a Harvard-PhD scientist and the other half as a Hollywood screenwriter. His love for theory combined with his love for narrative, and he built an “ABT Framework” to describe the fundamentals of narrative. ABT stands for “and… but… therefore…” It contends of an assertion AND perhaps another, BUT then a contradiction and conflict to that perspective. THEREFORE, there comes a resolution. In this book, he explores this…

Indie Program Management Software-Technology

Predicting the Unpredictable: Pragmatic Approaches to Estimating Project Schedule or Cost

By Scott J. Pearson | April 29, 2026April 29, 2026 by Scott J. Pearson

Software projects are notoriously difficult to estimate a time-to-completion, especially in the earliest days of a proposal. Sometimes, simple projects can prove time- and resource-consuming, and seemingly hard projects can complete quickly. Because learning is involved in every project, even good project managers struggle with wildly varying possibilities at first. Author Johanna Rothman offers her advice about what to do with this situation. A few pieces of her advice stand out. First, when estimating, always…

Indie Program Management Software-Technology

Beyond Delivery: How Technical Program Managers Lead Change & Grow with Impact

By Scott J. Pearson | March 21, 2026March 21, 2026 by Scott J. Pearson

Technical Program Managers (TPMs) are a recent phenomenon, particularly in larger organizations that use a lot of IT to achieve value. They combine the technical role and a leadership role in one function to enhance technical value. However, today’s literature on how to excel as a TPM is relatively sparse. Johnathan Stephen Sexton adds his experiences as a Walmart TPM to the mix in this book of homespun wisdom. As a very experience-driven account, he…

Indie Program Management Software-Technology

Mastering JIRA for Agile Projects: A Practical Guide with Real-World Examples (Confluence Included)

By Scott J. Pearson | December 18, 2025December 18, 2025 by Scott J. Pearson

Jira is becoming a leading tool for project management at larger businesses, and using it is a skill required for many jobs. This book teaches you how to master Jira processes to manage projects under Agile or Scrum paradigms. Half of this book focuses on Confluence software, which my workplace does not use. Therefore, half of the book was irrelevant to me. However, the Jira sections gave me a formal training that I lacked. It…

Artificial Intelligence Indie

The Complete Guide to Microsoft Agent Framework: Build, Test & Manage AI Agents that Integrate Seamlessly with Azure, M365 & Business APIs

By Scott J. Pearson | December 17, 2025December 17, 2025 by Scott J. Pearson

This book seeks to teach readers how to write Python or .NET code to perform certain tasks as Agents within Microsoft’s AI platform. Unfortunately, it’s heavy on code and light on concepts. I wish it’d teach more about how to integrate with Azure’s web interface instead of the command line alone. It does succeed at showing many examples of how to code agents, but it lacks a deep conceptual explanation of how agents integrate with…

Artificial Intelligence Indie

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) & Vector Databases: A Practical Guide for AI Developers

By Scott J. Pearson | December 17, 2025December 17, 2025 by Scott J. Pearson

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is how artificial intelligence prioritizes facts in a given domain over and above all the information the basic, foundational model offers. It allows businesses, scientists, and others to prioritize their custom knowledge instead of making up answers. It’s an extremely powerful tool that most AI users don’t understand. This book tries to explain the basics of a RAG system in Python code. Unfortunately, despite a grasp on the basics of RAG, it…

Indie Program Management Software-Technology

The Technical Program Manager Guide: Navigating the Path to Success

By Scott J. Pearson | December 6, 2025December 6, 2025 by Scott J. Pearson

Traditional program management consists of guiding a suite of programs for business success. As IT has recently become ascendant in the marketplace, that paradigm has applied to software in a role called the technical program manager. Leading tech companies, like Meta, Apple, and Amazon, have made ample use of this position in their business strategy. The problem is that there is no set career progression into this role. Arpit Agrawal tries to demystify this role…

Indie Software-Technology

29 Guidelines for Successful Pair Programming

By Scott J. Pearson | September 23, 2025September 23, 2025 by Scott J. Pearson

Among software engineers, pair programming occurs when two coders join together to write code together. It’s an incredibly efficient and focused means of knowledge transfer. However, developers are also known for having prickly, sometimes difficult personalities, and these personal hangups can get in the way of effective pair programming. Author Oozie Ligus has logged over 700 hours of time pair programming and offers his advice on how to build an effective relationship. Following “extreme programming”…

Artificial Intelligence Indie

Computational Linguistics & Artificial Intelligence

By Scott J. Pearson | July 19, 2025November 8, 2025 by Scott J. Pearson

I work in software applications in biomedical research. Artificial intelligence (AI) is a natural interest impacting my work and team. I’m always looking for thoughtful explorations of the topic. I stumbled upon this book on Amazon and thought I’d give the audiobook a try. I’m glad I did. Though Daniel Dinkelman’s work is far from perfect, it provided a helpful survey of the research landscape across the landscape in computational linguistics and AI. It concisely…