A World Without Email
By Stephen Darlington
| Feb 12, 2024
| books
Peter Drucker argued in a 1999 essay that the obsession with industrial improvement in the 20th Century is what lead to the productivity increase of manual labor by a factor of fifty between 1900 and 2000. Exemplified by Henry Ford’s transforming the manufacturing process of the Model T from the craftsman style that other auto makers used to the assembly line, this tinkering with workflows produced more and better work overall.
Digital Minimalism
By Stephen Darlington
| Feb 6, 2024
| books
Digital Minimalism by, Cal Newport is about re-examining your relationship with technology. Far from being neo-Luddite, Cal Newport is asking us to be more mindful of our consumption of social media, smartphones, and the 24-hour news cycle. As he says in the conclusion, “Digital minimalism definitely does not reject the innovations of the internet age, but instead rejects the way so man people engage with these tools.” I think that’s the key to everything: these things are tools.
Software Development: The Books
Part of the job of a software engineer is to keep learning. The development discipline is still relatively new and changes come frequently. Not only are there new frameworks and technologies sprouting every day (how ubiquitous has Docker become in the last decade?), but also new patterns and best practices of how to build software and software systems. There are slews of talks on YouTube and online courses, but sometimes nothing beats a book for a good, deep-dive into a topic.