Curious, Healing

Books about healing, business, and fun

“The Manager’s Path” by Camille Fournier

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Subtitle: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth & Change

I expected this book to be boring, but it’s engagingly written and connects with my experience of working in tech. Camille Fournier writes from her own experience as a CTO (Chief Technical Officer) at several companies and includes quotes from other tech leaders, both men and women.

She starts with mentoring, which almost every technical person is expected to do eventually, and works up through tech lead, manager, director, up to CTO and VP of Engineering. She advises anyone who wants to be a manager of software engineers to spend enough time learning to code (5-7 years) to have those skills solidly available going forward.

I’m a software engineer who has mentored people and led projects, but will not be climbing the corporate ladder any higher. It was interesting to hear about the concerns that arise at higher levels. The need to figure out who is unhappy, why teams are not working well together, who is managing badly, and who might leave suddenly. The need to make good decisions about future directions on insufficient data. The need to develop intuition and keep taking in information to guide those decisions.

As she talks about mentoring interns and managing individual contributors, she includes all technical roles. Her primary advice is that relationships and communication are crucial even though programming might appear to be a solitary technical occupation. Not only do successful projects require communication with other engineers and the manager, they require communication with the stakeholders who say what to build, and the sales and marketing people who help it go out into the world.

She talks a lot about the importance of one-on-one meetings between managers and the people they manage to build trust and address problems early. She recommends skip-level meetings, where a director who manages managers also meets with individual contributors.

In addition, positive relationships are crucial to success in the working world. Not only do they make work more pleasant, they help people collaborate and share information. People who like working together help each other get jobs in the future.

I can clearly see this is true over the 30 years of my career. I built positive working relationships naturally, and I’m still not sure the advice makes sense until one experiences it. It’s not about fake, forced networking with people one doesn’t like – it’s about staying connected and friendly with people one does like to support one another going forward. In school, success artificially depends only on individual actions (although I think kids do more group work nowadays), but most accomplishments out in the world depend on interconnected people building things together.

The pronouns in this book bothered me. Rather than using she/he or they, Camille Fournier switched between using he for some examples and she for others. An intern was he while being described in general, and then she when performance problems came up. After that the pronouns were more even-handed, but I was very aware of them all the way through, braced for women to be portrayed negatively. As far as I remember, they/them pronouns were not used for anyone.

Recommended to anyone who works in a technical field, and especially anyone who wants to become a manager.

Links from the book:
The Tyranny of Structurelessness by Jo Freeman aka Joreen, a classic essay on why managers are necessary.

On Being A Senior Engineer which includes the suggestion to use senior influence to sponsor (rather than mentor) underrepresented people in engineering. Recommend them for positions. Highlight their accomplishments. Praise them publicly. Also refers to What Does Sponsorship Look Like by Lara Hogan.

Available at Powell’s Books.

“Orwell’s Roses” by Rebecca Solnit

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Recommended to me by: It’s by Rebecca Solnit!

Rebecca Solnit starts from an encounter with rosebushes planted by George Orwell almost 100 years before, and expands with her usual grace and skill on his life as an essayist, activist, soldier in the Spanish Civil War, gardener, husband, and father. From there, she delves into his research into coal mining and its disastrous effects on the miners and on the environment; Stalin and his atrocities in the name of communism; Colombia’s greenhouses growing roses for export, with disastrous effects on the growers and the environment; and many more discursions on roses, beauty, totalitarianism, and history.

She shows that Orwell balanced the darkness in his writing and worldview with a joy in the natural world. He grew much of his own food, in addition to roses, in rural England.

Sometimes [Orwell] celebrated what was meant by the roses in “bread and roses”: the intangible, ordinary pleasure, the joy available in the here and now. [Page 92]

Bread can be managed by authoritarian regimes, but roses are something individuals must be free to find for themselves, discovered and cultivated rather than prescribed. “We know only that the imagination, like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity,” Orwell declares at the end of “The Prevention of Literature.” [Page 100]

Clarity, precision, accuracy, honesty, and truthfulness are aesthetic values to [Orwell], and pleasures. […] Clarity, honesty, accuracy, truth are beautiful because in them representation is true to its subject, knowledge is democratized, people are empowered, doors are open, information moves freely, contracts are honored. That is, such writing is beautiful in itself, and beautiful in what flows from it. [Page 231]

I read Nineteen Eighty-Four as a twelve year old on a ten-hour flight between New York and Tel Aviv, alternating between reading a few more horrifying pages and staring blankly at the 747 bulkhead. I have avoided George Orwell ever since, even though the last few years have proved him more and more prescient. Rebecca Solnit fills in the background of how he came to write such a dark book shortly before his death from tuberculosis at 46, and shows him as a whole, extraordinary person.

Recommended to anyone who wants to be a better, more informed citizen of the world.

Available at Powell’s Books.

“99 Bottles of OOP” by Sandi Metz, Katrina Owen, and TJ Stankus

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Subtitle: A Practical Guide to Object-Oriented Design

Recommended to me by: Sam Livingston-Gray

This book creates and then refactors (edits to improve) code to generate the “99 Bottles of Beer” song. (When I was a kid on field trips, we started at 100 Bottles.)

I read most of this book in 2015, but didn’t finish it, so didn’t add a post for it here. Apparently the initial “Shameless Green” code (straightforward code that makes the tests succeed) stuck with me, because I mostly reproduced it in the half-hour recommended to attempt the problem before reading the rest of the book.

There are lots of great points about object-oriented design and recipes for refactoring. The Ruby code that results at the end is elegant and easy to modify, although its readability benefits from the step-by-step walkthrough to get there. I will probably refer back to the book for refactoring tips when faced with Ruby code to improve.

Recommended for people wanting to improve their object-oriented coding skills, especially in Ruby. There are now editions available with code examples in PHP and Javascript as well, and the beverage can be beer or milk. Now I’m curious to see their code that generates the different versions of the book!

The book’s page and Sandi Metz’s website.

Available at SandiMetz.com.

“Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby” by Sandi Metz

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Subtitle: An Agile Primer

Recommended to me by: Sam Livingston-Gray

I first read this back in 2012. It struck me as friendly rather than condescending this time, which is an interesting shift.

In 2012 I was just learning Ruby and focused on deciphering the example code as I read. Coming back to it after having programmed in Ruby for three years, I could read the examples fluently and focus more on the general points in the book, even though I haven’t looked at Ruby code in a while.

Some points that stuck with me this time:

  • The purpose of design is to allow future changes in code, since requirements and circumstances keep changing.
  • In object-oriented design, pay attention to the messages passing between the objects.
  • Each object should have a single responsibility. (I’ve seen a downside to this, where you have to chase through a mass of fine-grained objects to find where something is actually done.)
  • Manage dependencies to reduce risk. An object should depend on objects that change less often than it does.
  • Inject dependencies, use Ruby’s duck typing: Send in an object as an argument that responds to the needed message
  • Delay design decisions until you have at least three examples of what a class needs to do. (Two, if pressed.)
  • Good design is TRUE: Transparent, Reasonable, Usable, Exemplary
  • DRY: Don’t Repeat Yourself.
  • Law of Demeter: Don’t chain calls through many objects, since that entails knowing too much about the insides of other objects.
  • Isolate risky bits of code inside a wrapper, so they can be improved easily later.
  • Test an object’s public interface (messages it responds to), and command messages it sends (messages with side effects).
  • Use Ruby Modules to share code and tests.

Highly recommended as a guide for both general design, and how to write maintainable, flexible Ruby code.

The book’s website and Sandi Metz’s website.

Available at Powell’s Books.

“What Fresh Hell Is This?” by Heather Corinna

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Subtitle: Perimenopause, Menopause, Other Indignities, and You

Recommended to me by: Captain Awkward

This book is for anyone with a uterus who is moving toward or in menopause, whether due to aging or medical procedures. Heather Corinna’s writing is funny, profoundly inclusive, and tends to run long, as seen on her teen sex ed website Scarleteen. She likes to cover all the possibilities and include all the possible disclaimers.

She writes about the history of how menopause has been perceived and treated (or not) in the past, mostly by men. She interviewed experts (mostly women, many BIPOC) on a variety of topics and includes quotes from them, opening up a cornucopia of further reading.

She makes self-care suggestions along with compassion for their difficulty. She acknowledges the irony of recommending better sleep to help with hot flashes which often disrupt sleep. Stress and trauma tend to worsen perimenopause effects, adding another reason to reduce stress and work on healing trauma.

She covers both negative and positive effects of menopause. Contrary to popular myth, it does not bring life and love to an end. It does prompt an evaluation of what is and isn’t working in one’s life and can lead to sweeping changes.

Highly recommended to anyone who might walk this road or knows someone who is walking it.

Heather Corinna’s website.

Available at Powell’s Books.

“Being In My Body” by Toni Rahman

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Subtitle: What you Might Not Have Known about Trauma, Dissociation and the Brain

Recommended to me by: a client

This book covers a lot of ground, and does it well. Toni Rahman summarizes current research into developmental trauma, CPTSD, dissociation, emotions, attachment, and polyvagal theory, as well as sharing some of her own story and client stories. She applies this material to parenting, inhabiting the body, and healthy adult intimacy.

Some of the many ideas in the book:

  • We are designed, from birth, to take refuge in the trusting bonds we have with others.
  • What children need from their caring adults is flexibility and openness balanced with a strong enough sense of self and one’s own limits, with curiosity about who this child is.
  • Regression is leaving the present moment and reliving the past instead. This can also be called an emotional flashback.
  • Feeling an emotion is acknowledging it, allowing it to be in the body. Emoting is acting it out: yelling, crying, etc.
  • Via Karla McLaren, event trauma happens not just from something difficult or overwhelming, but from not being welcomed back into the tribe afterward. A full initiation includes both surviving challenging circumstances, and being received with adequate attention, empathy, and care afterwards.
  • For an infant or small child, chronic or prolonged parental misattunement without adequate repair represents a traumatic threat to life.
  • Feeling threatened by a parent who is also a source of care is a problem in itself, compounded by not having support to express or resolve the problem. This is disorganized attachment.
  • For someone with unhealed disorganized attachment or CPTSD, intimacy is triggering and terrifying rather than soothing and nurturing.
  • How your body responds to intimacy is an echo of your early experiences.
  • We can approach our own bodies with care to build secure attachment and intimacy with ourselves.
  • You will know what you like because just thinking of it will make you feel soft, relaxed, and light, not restricted, guarded, or confused.

There are a couple of distracting textual errors in the book: duplicated client quotes, and at least one misspelling of a place name.

Overall, highly recommended for anyone interested in trauma, inhabiting the body, and healthy intimacy.

Toni Rahman’s website.

Available at Amazon.