Book cover This is a children's (6 to 10 years) book about leadership, the subtitle is Leadership With Elsa. While recapping the story of Disney's Frozen, it is a combination of pointing out leadership traits within the story, and pop-up video style call-outs to movie related facts. Because this is an educational title riding on top of the fictional story of Frozen, it is categorized as a non-fiction book....
Book Cover Subtitled, Life is What You Make It, this is a book about making things. It has many, many other components though. It is partly a memoir of the author's career. It is partly a book about management, especially the end of Chapter 4 which covers delegation and the importance of communication. It is also very instructional, in that it prescriptively lays out a number of best practices for making, along with illustrative stories of why these practices are so important....
I was reading my twitter feed, when I stumbled upon this: If a process is broken throw it in the trash and start over. Nothing is set in stone. The simplicity of the tweet is absolutely true. It totally reminded me of a problem I've seen multiple times though. The process is rarely the difficult part of fixing a problem. A long time ago, when I was a team lead, the group I worked with had an automated build system that was extremely complicated, built entirely in-house, and didn't follow the conventions of any of the standard build-systems that exist....
I can no longer count the number of times that I've been able to re-invigorate a problem investigation, even if I have zero visibility on the actual problem. This takes some self-discipline that doesn't come easy, especially during an urgent investigation. Here's that one weird trick:I do the depth of reading myself. If I see multiple threads, I'll read all of them. Then I will write as short a summary of all of the facts that I can....