Influences

Principles

Clayton Christensen’s How Will You Measure Your Life?. There’s so much wisdom in the book, but my favorite idea is tying humility to high self esteem.
Jim Dethmer: The Pillars of Integrity. I used to think integrity meant “acting ethically”. Listening to this, I revised my definition to “whole” or “acting in a coherent manner with your inner self”.
I have to mention July Zhuo’s A User Guide To Working With You, as it’s the direct inspiration for my README document.

Rich Hickey: Simple Made Easy is widely known. I love how it is rooted in relatively straightforward principles. It’s a big part of why I incorporate functional principles even in object oriented languages.
Sandi Metz: POODR, 99 bottles of OOP, “The Wrong Abstraction”. All of these have influenced how I think about Ruby code and given me, a self taught developer, a toolkit of computer science principles to work with. The main point of 99 bottles of OOP really hit home when I first read it.
Gary Bernhardt: Boundaries (Functional Core, Imperative Shell). Destroy All Software. And the classic Wat. Great stuff from someone who is internet famous to me.

Predictable Delivery. I stumbled across this a few years ago and it completely changed how I approach project planning. “[When is it going to be done?] is always the start of a conversation about balancing risks.” “Schedules are outlier dominated” 🤯
Slack by Tom DeMarco. Hyper efficiency is brittle. A great reframing of organizational design. I think a lot about creating space for teams to grow into thanks to this book.
Will Larson’s blog Irrational Exuberance. I particularly like his words on engineering strategy and on adding dimensions to eliminate tradeoffs.
The Manager’s Path. My path to software engineering leadership is unconventional. I worked in large engineering organizations, but as a mechanical engineer. This book has been really helpful for me to understand “best practices” in software engineering management tracks.
CommonCog. I found this site during their series on Tacit Knowledge. As a KPI skeptic, their series on becoming data-driven made metrics more approachable to me. “Focus on finding and controlling the input metrics”. (paraphrased)
Shape Up: Basecamp’s writing inspired a lot of the way we work at Bellawatt. While the tactics of Shape Up aren’t a great fit for us, I really love the principles. Their 6 week cycles set clear expectations, including helpful constraints and pre-committed trade offs. I also love their continued commitment to small teams.

bknoles/talks.md I’m not sure where this started. I forked it from an acquaintance in a Chicago tech group. I’ll watch talks from this during lunch from time to time. It’s probably due for an update.
Working Genius. I don’t love personality tests. I’m pretty flexible, so I end up wanting to check all 5 options on the questions and writing “it depends on the situation” in the margin. I don’t think the Working Genius test is necessarily more accurate than others, but the “Wonder” dimension unequivocally resonates with me. I also like its general principle: we all have strengths, and a team can become more than the sum of its parts when everyone has a role that plays to their unique strengths.