Content tagged with "tech"
This book was recommended by a friend as “the greatest book ever on intranet governance.” I was a little skeptical, seeing as it was 18 years old, but I did internet history so I took a chance on it. Great book. There is barely anything technical in it – the book is basically 400-some-odd pages…
A good overall discussion of A/B testing. More strategic than tactical – this is a book to convince executives to try experimentation, not for marketers to apply it. There’s an extended example of Obama’s 2008 captain, which was apparently where Optimizely got its start. The numbers are pretty…
An okay overview. I think I was looking for more of an in-depth title that got down into specifics of how a chatbot services might work, but perhaps that’s a different book. This is a very promotional title, written by a guy who runs a firm that consults on these things. It’s clearly trying to build…
An extremely short book that’s almost militant in its espousal of the SaaS mindset. It works as a sort of primer for people used to some other paradigm of software delivery to “re-program” them into a SaaS perspective. It covers everything from development cycles to support to sales, etc. This is…
Solid book. Straddles the line between the technical and business aspects.
This book started so well, but then it got way more in-depth than I wanted to get, and it ultimately lost me. This is a book about how computers work. Literally how the computer thinks. The author starts off with basic codes, like Morse Code, explaining how more complex concepts can be made from…
This is one of those books that I feel like you should read in a group. You should study discuss every chapter. There’s just so much here. The book is about products that require “network effects” to work. Network effects is the concept that some things need more than one person using them to be of…
This book tries to answer the question: will AI ever be able to emulate human creativity? It never really answers the question, but it’s still very, very interesting. Each chapter covers a different type of creativity: writing, music, art, etc. It’s full of examples and anecdotes about the advances…
I’ve become interested in interactive fiction lately. I found an article about ergodic fiction, and when I defined that word, I found this book, in which the concept was apparently coined. It’s called Cybertext because the word cyber comes from a prefix refering to the control of systems. This in…
So, this book didn’t teach me anything new, but it was interesting, and had some good information about early Internet history, which I appreciate. The book has a chapter on each of a variety of “dark” things that the Net plays host to: Trolling Racism and Hate Groups Bitcoin and Crypto-Currency…
The key to this book is to note that it’s called “DESIGNING bots,” not “DEVELOPING bots.” This book is about all the planning and forethought that goes into create a bot in the generic sense . It’s about branding, personality, conversation flows, etc. It has nothing to do with actually building the…
A very complete look at all the steps necessary to manage devops in a software shop. Some of it was lost on me, because it’s exactly what it purported to be: a comprehensive review of everything you might do to manage the process of releasing and supporting software. Of interest was some emphasis on…
This book offers up the premise that the Internet has enabled new methods of original research that didn’t exist before. Things like link analysis, search engine indexing analysis, and site crawling analysis. Some of it is interesting, like an extended comparison of the Serbian, Bosnian, and…
A short supplement to the main text. A handy refresher, that extracts the major concepts. The book itself is a neat idea – perhaps worth reading again, one a year, to help identify things in the main text you need to brush up on.
This is a book about making physical things…do stuff. In a digital world, we tend to think about tech in terms of bits and bytes, but there’s a bunch of physical things that are “smart” as well. How do we move from smart things to “enchanted” things. The author explains: This book is about how to…
I’ve used HTMX for a number of years . As such, this book is preaching to the choir quite a bit. Like a lot of situations with technology, the book exists on two levels: It does quite well at both. It’s very much swimming upstream, given the current technical environment, but it makes a good case…
A solid history of Bell Labs. Interesting, but a bit tedious. It’s astonishing how much stuff was invented there – it puts Xerox PARC to shame, really. The transistor? Wow. Meticulously researched, but tends to bog down under its own weight in places.
Amazingly wonderful book on the history of the digital age, all the way from Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage through to Sergey Brin and Larry Page. Wonderfully written, always engrossing. It begins with a long discussion of Lovelace, Babbage, and Turing’s thoughts on whether a machine could ever be…
Not what I expected. I thought I was getting a technical book with literal strategies for managing and migrating legacy systems. Instead, the book spends a lot of time on organizational politics, change planning, and even developer psychology. I’m not saying this is wrong , but I feel like it wasn’t…
This is a solid introduction to GraphQL. The problem is authors have is that GraphQL is a standard, not a technology. So they have to pick and choose how they demonstrate the concepts as opposed to an implementation of it. They do a good job – the chapters are clear, and they eventually move from…
this is a solid book about larger scale digital governance. i say “larger scale” because it’s primarily about how to get order at the higher-levels – c-level, vp level, and steering committee level. this differentiates “governance” and “operations” for me: governance is Big Picture steering, where…
This book is scattered. The author doesn’t build on a single case, but shotguns all sorts of things at the reader. Additionally, it gets very confused with the author’s desire to discuss workers rights and working conditions. There’s a weird segue in the middle to discuss the Cold War, which – for…
This is a tough one to review because I’m very close to it – I know Sam, and he mentions me quite a bit in the book, including a lovely acknowledgment. That said, this book is…aspirational. It’s presenting a goal for how Sam wants the web to be. Sam makes claims in here about what’s happening on the…
I picked this up from an automation vendor at a MarTech conference . It’s not a bad title, but it’s clearly designed to get people excited about the possibilities of automation and what they could do with it . There’s not a lot to say here – the book presents all sorts of ideas and “recipes” for how…
I was going to rate this book even lower, because it was just stratospheric in scope – it was so high-level as to be basically useless. There was just nothing at all tactical here; it was full of generalities that, honestly, seemed a little obvious. Additionally, the book seemed like a long…
A short but wonderful book about how we perceive complex systems and some techniques for understanding them better.
I tried to understand this, but it went so, so far over my head. I’ve been working on the web for 25 years. I have a minor in philosophy. Neither of those things helped. I got about halfway through it before giving up. It’s dense, man. I feel badly for not sticking it out, but at the end, I was just…
A book about the rise of “platforms” – systems that don’t do anything except connect other people. Think AirBnB, Facebook, Uber, etc. A good look at all the challenges, especially things like network effects, how to get people on the platform to start with, and how to keep them on the platform over…
An absolutely fantastic novel. Very, very long, but it never slows down. It’s more Tom Clancy than cyberpunk. A MMOPRG does play a part in the plot, but it’s more about globe-hopping and gunfights than computers. You know how when you read about ransomware attacks from Asia, you think, “Man, I wish…
This book was written 25 years ago, in 1995, right on the cusp of the Internet as we know it today. Bill Gates was the CEO of Microsoft at the time, and this book was really meant to be an look at the exciting things that we coming in the future. It’s chapter after chapter about how the “information…
This is a story of a bunch of hacks, which the author has strung together. The claim is that NotPetya, WannaCry, the Korean Olympic hack, etc. were all the work of the same organization – a Russian GRU hacking group nicknamed “Sandworm” . I enjoyed the book, but there’s a lot there. The single…
I can’t decide if this book was depressing or not. It came out 19 years ago, and even though the author is a little behind in his predictions, a lot of what he wrote about is slowing coming true. “The Singularity” is that moment when technology kind of …takes over. Kurzweil didn’t come up with the…
Honestly, I just didn’t get it. This book was described in near-mythical terms, but it seemed tedious to me. Maybe I’m just not used to hardware design, or I’m not an engineer anymore – I don’t know what, but the over-arching point of this was lost. There was some philosophy toward the end of…
This is a long look at the history of spam, in all its forms. Spam has a long history, from email to Usenet to social media to everything in between. The book has a nice general definition of spam: an abuse of someone’s attention. So, if someone is paying attention to something else, and you take…
A wonderful history of the telegraph which proves that all of the “novel” problems the Internet brought about actually happened 150 years earlier. Standage pays social attention to the societal changes that the telegraph wrought, and the effect it had on the lives of the telegraph operators who went…
Bellingcat is a “open source intelligence” cooperative. It’s a group of people who surf the internet to find evidence of crimes. They made their name during the Syrian conflict. They would scour uploaded videos and compare them to Google Maps to find where they were taken. In doing so, they were…
Wonderfully complete history of Reddit, from the childhood lives of founders Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman, through the life of Aaron Swartz. The book has short chapters, and is mainly episodic – each chapter covers some moment in the history of Reddit, and they’re all there: the rise of…
This is the second book I’ve read that sort of argues that technology is kind of its own life form. It “wants” to advance, and humans are just the unwitting accomplices. This isn’t…bad. Meaning the book isn’t dystopian or doom and gloom or something. But is does speak to the idea that technology is…
The title promised a discussion about how the 60s “shaped” the personal computer industry, but I just didn’t see it. The book is a history of technology and how the seminal figures of that period interacted with culture, but it didn’t show me how society “shaped” the industry, as much as the…
This book is good if you want a long, detailed history of the ARPANET, the direct predecessor to the Internet. For that, it’s fascinating. That said, it’s not a casual reader. I’m neck-deep in the Internet every day and am a fan of Internet history, and even I got bored in places. Still, if you ever…
