Sonia Connolly

“Tales From Moominvalley” by Tove Jansson

September 27, 2022 by Sonia Connolly Leave a Comment

I found the old familiar paperback edition of this book, the one illustrated with a bored Moominpapa having tea, in a Little Free Library and took it home with me.

The stories are silly and fantastical, and also contain serious themes. Authenticity. Friendship. Attachment to things. Attachment to people. Fear and dread, and surprising resolutions that lighten them, sparks of life and light and love.

The endearing line drawings are also by Tove Jansson.

I read and enjoyed it, and then took it back to the Little Free Library where I found it, for someone else to enjoy.

Available at Powell’s Books.

“Crucial Conversations Third Edition” by Patterson, Grenny, McMillan

September 4, 2022 by Sonia Connolly Leave a Comment

Subtitle: Tools For Talking When Stakes Are High

Recommended to me by: my boss

I read this book back in 2013 and decided to reread it when my boss mentioned it.

In addition to my summary in 2013, I noticed more about questioning inner stories. When we assign roles like Villain, Victim, and Helpless One, we close off avenues to potential solutions. When we can see everyone in a situation as a complex human with a mix of skills, past experiences, and motivations, we can see openings for solutions more clearly.

I wrote about a similar approach in 2018 in Offer a Collaborative Story.

Crucial Conversations has an oversimplified approach to emotions. The claim is that emotions are caused by our stories, and we have to change stories to change or quiet our emotions. While it is true that a negative story can escalate negative emotions, overall our emotions are signals about our inner truth. It is a mark of privilege to expect everyone to be calm in a difficult situation. Telling people they are causing a problem by having the “wrong story” can quickly shade into gaslighting.

The book has an extended example where a woman is silenced and talked over by a man in a business context. The message of the example is that we have to give everyone the benefit of the doubt and ask them for what we need without regard to privilege, sexism, and institutional power. We all exist in a sexist, racist, capitalist system, and people who act out those biases are not inherently evil. At the same time, putting responsibility on a less privileged individual to manage the situation without mentioning the systemic issues in play is oversimplified and imbalanced. The authors could have mentioned that the situation is stacked against the less privileged person, and that if their techniques don’t work, it doesn’t mean she did them wrong or didn’t try hard enough.

The book contains a lot of ableist and judgmental language. “Dumb” and other slurs are used liberally. Some behaviors are ascribed to “the worst at dialogue” (italics theirs) without noticing that they are failing at their own command to be generous and ascribe positive motives.

This is a recently published third edition. While it contains some useful ideas, I cannot recommend it wholeheartedly because of the shortcomings that have not been addressed.

Available at Powell’s Books.

“The Changeling Sea” by Patricia McKillip

September 4, 2022 by Sonia Connolly Leave a Comment

Recommended to me by: People mourning McKillip

This book was first published in 1988, and it is one of the books by Patricia McKillip I have carried with me since I was a teenager. I didn’t love it the way I did the Riddle-Master trilogy or Forgotten Beasts of Eld, but I liked it enough to keep it through several purges of my SciFi and Fantasy paperbacks.

Sadly, McKillip died recently, and people mentioned The Changeling Sea as one of their favorites. I pulled it from the shelf and took it with me to spend time at my beloved Berkeley Rose Garden. It was the perfect book to read while sitting on a bench surrounded by roses.

I liked the theme of communication, using words carefully, and repairing ancient grudges and broken relationships. I was less pleased by an innocent 15-year-old village girl being treated as an appropriate romantic target by a traveling magician. The narrative doesn’t give his age, but he seems experienced enough to be at least 25, perhaps 30 years old. I wish young me had had books with better messages about adults protecting teen girls, rather than treating them like grown women.

Available at Powell’s Books.

“The Manager’s Path” by Camille Fournier

May 28, 2022 by Sonia Connolly Leave a Comment

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

March 31, 2022 by Sonia Connolly Leave a Comment

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

February 23, 2022 by Sonia Connolly Leave a Comment

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.