Monthly Archives: August 2012

I’m not a programmer, or coder, and I have never worked on a software developer team, so I am not sure exactly what spurred me on to pick up Team Geek by Brian Fitzpatric and Ben Collins-Sussman. Both of them work at Google, and I had heard a bit about this book through one channel or another, and it piqued my interest. I’m glad I got it and read it.

While ostensibly about the ways that a team of software programmers can work together, and avoid chaos and friction as much as possible, the book’s larger theme of how people can come together, learn from each other, respect each other’s expertise and work on larger ideas in collaboration with each other really resonated with me in these days of Personal Learning Communities and Communities of Practice and whatever other term is popping around the educational circles these days.

With great humor and lively writing (ie, humans are “giant intermittent bugs” of code), Fitzpatrick and Collins-Sussman put a premium on four main traits of a group that can work together:

• Humility
• Respect
• Trust

In their view, a solid team and its leaders keeps these three ideals intact at all times. It’s simple, but powerful. We need humility to admit that we don’t know everything and are always in search of better information that someone else might have. We need to respect the interests and expertise of our colleagues, even when their interests might not jive with our own. And we need to trust that together, we can do a better job than if either of us were alone, and we need to believe that the team has our best interests at heart. If that isn’t applicable to the ways that teachers and educators come together to plan curriculum or talk about students or shift into big changes (Common Core, anyone?), then I don’t know what is.

At the end, the writers admit that while they were writing about software teams, they really weren’t writing just about software teams. “Our stories are essentially about the art of maintaining a healthy, functional community — any community … Humans are tricky to deal with no matter what the context, and software development has the same community-health issues as any other group endeavor.” (158)

So do educational groups.

Peace (in the code of HRT),
Kevin

PS — here is one of the videos they did for Google about programming with humans in mind. It will give you a taste of their humor.

I admire Neal Stephenson for honesty. He begins his collection of essays and stories — Some Remarks — with the admission that some of the pieces may not hold up so well over time and that he feels a bit odd as a published novelist to suddenly pull together his essays and shorter ideas into a book format. And while I didn’t find all the pieces worth reading through ’till the end, I didn’t feel all that guilty about abandoning a piece, either. I think Neal would understand.

That said, there are some intriguing pieces in here in which Stephenson — whose Snow Crash is still one of my favorite cyberpunk novels but I could not get into his System of the World series — explores technology and culture from an introspective and inquiry angle, and Stephenson the informational writer is fun to read. He brings a lot of voice and wit to the page. Two pieces that come to mind are the one about China and how technology innovation is changing China’s (and Hong Kong, and Taiwan) role in the world and the longer (a bit too long, perhaps?) piece about the laying of the longest undersea wire system in the world that later became one of the main pathways for the world’s data information flow.

There are a couple of interview transcripts, too, that are interesting to read, particularly as you realize how Stephenson grapples with the label of science fiction writer in the literary world. And I did enjoy his final piece, in which he explains to the reader why he does not take time to respond to readers, noting that if he replied to emails and letters and spoke at more conferences, he would have less time to write his novels. And, he explains, he would rather be a writer than a “correspondent.” Nice done.

Peace (in the article),
Kevin

It’s been years since I have cracked open the pages of a John Grisham novel (although I have been intrigued by his new youth series about a kid detective. Theodore Boone). But the theme of baseball never ends in our house of three boys, and with our family trip to the beach last week, I grabbed and packed Calico Joe as part of my mix of reading. I remembered why I have not cracked a Grisham novel in a while (the writing) but I also remembered what makes Grisham so popular — he’s a decent storyteller.

Calico Joe follows the aftermath of an event years in the past when the narrator’s father, a professional baseball pitcher with a mean streak at home and on the mound, may or may not have intentionally beaned the best prospect coming into baseball in generation, ending Calico Joe’s career and creating a whirlwind of controversy that the narrator (Paul) seeks to resolve. It felt like I was watching a movie, such as The Natural, as I read the book, and I finished it in a single day. (And in fact, the story is inspired by the real events of the death of Ray Chapman, the only major league player to be killed by a pitch)

I liked how baseball and personal history came together in this novel, even if the writing itself wasn’t necessarily my style. I was hoping for something with little more substance, even though the relationship between Paul, the son and narrator, and Warren, the father, is complicated. But it’s complicated in a conventional way, you know? Still, it’s hard to argue with a fast-paced, quick read at times, and Calico Joe is just that. I would just wait for the paperback version, that’s all. Maybe next summer.

Peace (on the field),
Kevin

As someone who reviews graphic novels, I saw my fair share of Steve Jobs biographies get churned out when the Apple co-founder passed away and Walter Isaacson’s book about Jobs hit the best-seller list. This one — Steve Jobs: Genius by Design — by Campfire Books (which puts out a lot of interesting graphic novels based on popular and obscure myths and stories) is nicely done, and could easily pique the interest of students who know a bit about Jobs but not enough to understand him as an innovator who suffered lots of failure before success.

The book follows Isaacson’s story closely, it seems to me, and the publishers are right to start out with a lengthy disclaimer, acknowledging that they were piecing together the story of Jobs’ life through multiple sources in a hopes “to celebrate his legacy.” And the book nicely balances the pros (Jobs’ much celebrated ability to see technology through the lens of design and use his gut instinct for development of ideas and products) and the cons (his early abandonment of his daughter and harsh treatments of employees and friends). As with other pieces, this book shows the complicated person Jobs was to the public (and probably even more complicated to those he was close to in private).

Campfire also has posted a preview of the book, which is handy for teachers when considering the purchase.

Peace (in the graphic novel),
Kevin