Book Report: Abolish Silicon Valley
It's a memoir by a computer nerd who bought into the startup myth, and then was very disillusioned very quickly. I worked at a pre-IPO software startup. We IPOed, but at a low price. The investors...
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Book Report: The Great Getty
This biography tells the story of J. Paul Getty, oil tycoon. Getty made his millions the old-fashioned American way: his father was an oil tycoon. Reading about his early years as he lucks into a for...
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Book Report: Troublemakers
It's a swath of Silicon Valley history in the 70s and thenabouts; short biographies of some folks I'd heard of and others I hadn't. There's a good variety. I didn't learn much about the organizations...
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Book Report: Brotopia
It's a book about various ways women in tech are made miserable by men in tech, focusing on some recent news stories. (It's not all recent stuff. E.g., we find out that part of the reason that progr...
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Book Report: The Sugar King of Havana
Biography of a sugar magnate in Cuba before, during, and after Castro's revolution. Tales of market-cornering. The satisfaction of a local Cuban running sugar mills more efficiently than Americans tr...
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Book Report: Disrupted
In this memoir, a reporter flees journalism to join the marketing department of HubSpot, a snake-oil-ish computer startup. At first I thought he was being overly harsh about the snake-oil-ish-ness. F...
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Book Report: Leading Teams
I'm used to management books aimed at team leaders. This book seems aimed higher, perhaps at directors. E.g. it talks about different levels of autonomy to grant a team; when I read this part, I thou...
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Book Report: Scaling Teams
It's a book about managing and directing software developers. It's pretty good. It has a bag of tricks; it tells you which tricks are appropriate for which situations; it tells you symptoms of those ...
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Ever wonder why the engineering department doesn't normally get business headshots? ...
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Job search is done: I accepted an offer at Token, which writes software to help banks do bank-y things on the internet. Many thanks and appreciations to folks who pointed me at places, pointed places...
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Help me find a programming job?
[Update:] Job found! Hello excellent friends, especially local computer nerd friends. I'm looking for work. Specifically, I'm looking for work as a programmer in the San Francisco Bay Area. Behold,...
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Book Report: Work Rules
It's a book about business people operations by Google's Laszlo Bock. (Ex-Google, but at Google when he wrote the book…) There's important advice in there even if your company doesn't have gey...
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Book Report: Stress Test
It's a memoir by Tim Geithner, Treasury Secretary under Obama associated with government bailouts following the mortgage crisis. I wasn't a fan of the bailouts. I read this book figuring I'd learn ...
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Book Report: Liar's Poker
When Hillary Clinton took Wall Street money and passed laws to help Wall Street companies, was that so bad? Read this book for the practical jokes but also to remember Wall Street's outrages. Liar's ...
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Book Report: Collaboration
It's a book about things that can go right or wrong when a big organization encourages or discourages collaboration. Done well, it can help. Done poorly, it can harm. This book didn't really help me ...
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Book Report: The Everything Store
It's a history of Amazon. That's Amazon the company, not the Amazon region of what-have-you. As near as I can tell, mean people thrive as Amazon negotiators. In various areas, Amazon will start out w...
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Book Report: Hipster Business Models
In which the Pricenomics writers report on some small and/or modern businesses. These folks didn't necessarily set out to be hipsters. A writer who sat in the park and wrote stories on demand. As he ...
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Book Report: Lean In
I heard a bunch of bad things about this book. I read it so that I could make fun of it. But now that I've read the book, the bad things I've heard seem like they were about a strawman version. I'll ...
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Wondering why California doesn't raise water prices during a drought? You might enjoy The King of California, the history of a California family farm; though this "family farm" was more of an agribus...
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Online tax filing could use decent image meme support. In the USA, this should be a fine way to fill in Federal Form 6251: ...
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Open Source, part of the new gig
It feels like Twitter has open-sourced a bigger fraction of its software than Google has. I haven't scientifically measured that; and even so, I hedged with "fraction"—Google has open-sourced a...
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Geoworks Lunch photos
I found a couple of photos from the ex-Geoworks Lunch Sep 2012 that I'd snapped with my phone. Don't worry; the the food hadn't arrived when I snapped these photos, so you won't see nerds eating. ...
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Twitter is Hiring a Tech Writer
...or maybe more than one. I dunno, @JoinTheFlock is mysterious to me. I didn't even know the listing was up until someone told me. Am I under a non-solicit thingy with you? I.e., do you work at Goo...
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Book Report: Founders at Work
It's a book of interviews with people who founded high-tech companies. It's pretty darned interesting to hear the stories from the horses' mouths, as it were. There's not just one "Founder story". Re...
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Book Report: In the Plex
Why do I keep reading Steven Levy books? They're full of mistakes. He interviews people who know a lot... and then somehow still gets it wrong. I read In the Plex because, golly, he talked to all the...
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Site Update: Updated Resume
After a four+ year job hunt, I landed a new job. Thus, I updated my resume. To save you the trouble of clicking through: I quit Google; I started at Twitter. Frequently anticipated questions: Q: OM...
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Book Report: Startup Engineering Management
This book Startup Engineering Management is aimed at engineering managers at startup companies—but is pretty good for engineering managers at big companies, too. It has some info about everythi...
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As a professional technical writer, I am always on the look-out for documentation "success stories." Documentation, when done right, can improve lives. For example, this evening on the bus ride home...
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Technical Writing Student Internships
Google is taking technical writing interns this summer. Yeah, everyone at Google's a genius and should never ever need anything explained to them. OMG especially not by some wet-behind-the-ears compu...
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Book Report: Marketing in the Age of Google
(Disclosure and/or disclaimer: I don't speak for my employer. If you know who my employer is, you might guess I have all kinds of confidential insider Search Engine Optimization secrets, but I don't....
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Book Report: The Snowball
It's a biography of Warren Buffet. It's pretty long. But there are some good stories in here, the writing is good, and it smells well-researched. It edges around some touchy topics, but it's prett...
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Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even the world of corporate training... hey, don't fall asleep when I say that
At work, I work in a training group. I was just listening to one of my fellow trainers talk about an outfit that makes some service for education/train-ish folks. It's called Moving Knowledge. It's...
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Book Report: Slack
Today I was that guy on the bus who wears too much scent. Not my fault! An automatic air freshener squirted me. Now I know why "fresh" can mean "offensive". I am very fresh right now, in that sens...
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Jotting Notes on DeeAnn Soles GC Summit 2009 Presentation: Being GC
[DeeAnn Sole of Team Snout spoke at the GC Summit 2009. You remember when I volunteered on the Hogwart's Game, I followed around this one lady who, operationally, had the whole game in her head? The...
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Book Report: Microsoft Rebooted
This book is about changing a company's culture. It's about Microsoft. It's about Gates and Ballmer shifting the company's culture as they had to comply with the various legal judgments against the...
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Book Report: The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR
This book, written by PR consultants tells you why your business is spending too much money on advertising and should spend money on PR instead. Advertising lacks credibility. E.g., when I see an o...
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Book Report: On a Roll
This is a book about business, yet it's a good book. It's Howard Jonas' autobiography. He starts out operating a hot-dog pushcart. He moves on to distributing those tourism brochures you see in ho...
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Book Report: Growing a Business
This is a book about running small businesses. The title says "growing", but it might as well have said "evolving". Hawken is thoughtful and wise, reminding the reader not to take on too many probl...
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Book Report: Peopleware
I work for a large company. Thus, there are "leadership seminars" with "team-building exercises." I attended one of those. I was confessing this to some friends on Saturday, and one of them knew e...
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Book Report: DEC is Dead, Long Live DEC
This is a book about DEC, Digital Equipment Corporation, a start up that grew big. The author argues that some of the things that made it a great start-up, a great place to work... these things also...
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Book Report: Competing on Internet Time, Breaking Windows
Competing on Internet Time This book is about the rise of Netscape including competing with Microsoft, contrasting Netscape's nimble pace to Microsoft's slow release cycles. I didn't finish the book...
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Book Report: Information Development
Last week, I hung out with a lot of technical writers. It was fun. They were from around the world, and they came with some interesting points of view. And with some interesting foreign microbes. ...
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Book Report: Punching In
I guess I can't think of anything to say about how BANG 19 is going that wouldn't give away seekrit stuff. So here's a book report for Punching In. To research this book, the author worked a few we...
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Book Report: Scratch Beginnings
Adam Shepard wanted to see if he could start out in a strange city with just $25 and a bagful of clothes and become a "member of society": have an operational car, a furnished apartment, have $2500, ...
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Book Report: The Social Life of Information
It was six months when I started looking for work and it was just this last week that I got my first phone screen. There aren't many technical writing jobs in San Francisco, thus phone screens are ra...
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Book Report: Making Globalization Work
This book is worth reading. That's unfortunate; it has about 30 pages of interesting material scattered amongst 300 pages of verbiage. It's a book about Globalization--mostly about opening up marke...
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Book Report: In Search of Stupidity
I'm not working on gPhone the Open Handset Alliance. There were various internal recruiting drives for the project; I slunk away from those, kept my head down. I've worked on some mobile phone plat...
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Site Update: Updated Resume
I updated my resume. If you know about any tech writing jobs in San Francisco, please let me know. Yes, in San Francisco. No, I don't think that's very likely. But it's worth asking!Labels: busine...
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Book Report: Just for Fun
cranea17:/evidence> ls What do you think this is, UNIX? I think that's funny, but that's because I spend a lot of time in UNIXoid environments, specifically Linux. I'm biased. Maybe that's als...
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Book Report: The Best Software Writing
This weekend has been hectic. I attended a Game Control summit. I haven't listened to the audio I recorded. It could be interesting; it could be white noise. I stopped by the start of the Chinese...
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Book Report: Against the Gods (the Remarkable Story of Risk)
Last night, I went out to a musical performance dealie. It was TV on the Radio. I'd heard their most recent album, and it seemed OK but not great. But Rob Pfile wanted to go see the show. Rob has...
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Book Report: Guanxi
This book is about how Microsoft set up a research lab in Beijing. This was a pioneering effort. China's economy had opportunities for kids who wanted to Make Money Fast in computing--but not so mu...
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Book Report: A Perfect Red
Blogger just enabled full editing of templates in the new Layout system. It's different from the old Blogger template system. I played with an early version of it, and I like it a lot better. It wa...
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Book Report: The Search
Just a few hours ago, my weekend plans were so simple. Put the excellent game PsychoNauts into my backpack so I remember to bring it home from work. On the way home from work, stop off at BlockBust...
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Book Report: Why We Buy
Reading this book in 2005 was a waste of my time. When this book was first published back in 1999, it was probably pretty interesting. So interesting that everyone was talking about it. So I had a...
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Book Report: The King of California
This book by Mark Arax and Rick Wartzman ranks up with Cadillac Desert and City of Quartz as great books about the intersection of geography and history in the Western USA. It's about the history of...
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