Geeks in Teams – Team Geek by Fitzpatrick and Collins-Sussman

Some weeks ago, I came across a quite interesting title from O’Reilly Media, Team Geek by Brian W. Fitzpatrick and Ben Collins-Sussman. There are quite a lot of books out in the shelves trying to explain how to behave as well as how to improve your life as a professional programmer. However, most of them are either hard to read, difficult to understand or just boring while repeating stereotypes over and over.

Team Geek is quite different, though. It seems the book benefits from the experience of the authors. Both come up with a bunch of experience working at Google and probably dealing with quite a lot of people during their professional life.

The Content

Six chapters, each about 20 pages – some with topics you probably never thought about and others just confirming what you ever thought of but never believed in. And that’s basically what you most benefit from. The book shows you are not alone with your thoughts how teams and collaboration should work. It’s about you as a developer (as a human thing) but also working in a team of geeks (often not understood as humans at all).

The Truth

Based on my very own experience during my professional life, I have to acknowledge almost everything the two authors write is true. Considering the fact, the book is written based on an US American context, with different culture, people and background, most of the topics are true for European developers as well. It seems the kind of human becoming a developer is the same all over the world. Whatever if it was during my time in UK or Germany, the you can apply many of the patterns provided in the book to your daily job.

The Reader

Professional developers, managers, team leads, architects, open source developers and even designers could benefit from the book. However, I would definitely recommend to already provide some experience in this kind of business to fully understand (i.e. to feel with the authors) what’s written and to benefit from the book. Not sure if beginners (e.g. students) or juniors can benefit from the book. Eventually, the reader will find some hints how to improve his or her daily life within a world of geeks and nerds and how to strengthen the very own standing within the company or group.

Pros

• well written and easy to read
• chapters of the right size to read during an evening
• nice illustrations (not a reason to buy but really nice to look at)
• great content
• references for further reading given

Cons

• terrible to useless index
• not suitable for juniors and beginners (but that’s fine)

Where From

You can order the paperback or the Kindle version from Amazon or get the entire set of digital formats directly from O’Reilly.

The Cleaner Coder

I recently finished the latest book from Robert C. Martin aka Uncle Bob, called The Clean Coder.
Once finished there are many pro and cons about this book. At the beginning I was quite skeptic about the book but at the end I am glad I’ve read it to the very end.

The books is neither a set of rules that make you a better software developer nor is it really provide a code of conduct to follow in your professional life. However, if you spend some time in this industry, you will have many déjà vu moments while reading this book.

Very positive (if you a frequent reader and being interested in the people behind the books) is the fact that you will learn a lot about Martin as a person. Each chapter is more or less a short essay about a past project or part of his former work, some experiences he made and the (not so surprisingly) conclusions he made. There are quite a few sentences that are worth to remember, sometimes things you thought of many times but have not found the right words to write it down. Also you might find some interesting anecdotes you might learn something from (or did you know where carriage return and new line come ‘/r/n’ from and why they vary on different operating systems?).

One very positive aspect is that he points out what a professional (software developer) is, how he should behave and what could do to be recognized as such. In our industry you are still recognized as some kind of nerd, a geek who codes 24h hours a day, does not sleep, consumes a lot of caffeine and plays video games which a lack of social skills. While some of these things might be true, one expects often that you work more than the regular time, you solve each and every problem without any failure and that you come up with miracles, wonders performing magic, voodoo and code kung-fu each and every day (often for a very conservative salary). Nothing you would expect from other professionals (lawyers, doctors etc.).

Eventually, he writes about many things I, and probably you too, experience each and every day in our day work. At the end it is a nice reading book you might read during some evenings. Just the very final chapter about the tools he uses in his work (vi, Emacs, Eclipse etc.) and the frequent mentioning of FitNesse (which is Martins’ project) are quite unnecessary.

I am not fully convinced that the book is a must have reading, however, I work in this industry for nearly 13 years in various projects, research and product development, large and small companies, consulting and academia with different teams in different countries. At the very end it is quite calming to see once more that my problems are everywhere the same, have been the same for a long time and probably will stay the same for a long time in this industry.