books

book review – “Being Geek”

I’ve been reading Michael Lopp’s blog, Rands in Repose, for some time.  Lopp has a pretty good geek resume, with experience at Symantec, Borland, Netscape, and Apple.  His blog is one that I always read.  He’s got a great gift for distilling lessons out of his experiences.  Being Geek: The Software Developer’s Career Handbook is mostly a compilation of his blog posts, with some new essays added to help define the overall arc of a geek’s career, from starting at a new job to deciding to move on to the next one.

Looking on my own experience in tech companies, I think that his advice is often spot-on.  There have been times when I’ve read one of his blog posts after a difficult situation and found myself understanding it better.  He’s got a keen eye for detail and for understanding the nuances of geek behaviour, as well as all of the interacting forces that come into play when you’re working for a big geek company.  I’ve gone back to read half-remembered posts that I felt were pertinent to a given situation.

I found it amusing that Lopp says in his introduction that he’s not writing a book that gives you ten steps for anything, or that will define the five characteristics of a top leader, but most of his essays are structured in just that form: distill a situation into some archetypes, identified by Capital Letters or catchy names for people and their foibles.  For an occasional blog post, I don’t mind this style; as a book, this structure got rather repetitive.  While I love the blog, I found that I couldn’t read the book for more than a half-hour without losing interest because the style just didn’t work for an actual book.

Honestly, I was hoping for more.  The blog is excellent.  I hoped that a book would use the blog as a starting point and give more consideration, more depth, to the topic at hand.  But it’s not there.  If, like me, you’ve been reading his blog for some time, I can’t really recommend this book.  You’ve read most of it before, albeit in a different order.  The new pieces don’t really add that much.  If you’re not a reader of his blog, this book is a good look at moving through your geek career.  I’d recommend adding his blog to your reading list while you’re at it.

Here’s a list of the blog posts which are included in the book.  I think this is complete, but I might be wrong if something got re-titled or my search-fu was weak.  Also, I didn’t do more than a cursory glance when looking for the blog posts, so it’s possible that blog posts were updated for inclusion in the book.

Now that I’ve catalogued the posts that made it into the book, I see that the book has 41 essays, of which 27 are listed above.  That means that 14 essays are new content, about 1/3 of the book.