I’m a serial adventurer and entrepreneur who loves to read, teach, and encounter our world in as many different ways as I can. I am an innately curious programmer and a goal-oriented completionist at heart. I’ve cruised around America’s Great Loop, run a marathon, written more than fifteen books, and been involved with many small businesses. I also love to work with new programming languages. I was around for the early days of the Java, Ruby, and Elixir programming languages. I built teams to build products using each one of them. My passion is to help programmers break through their blockers with fresh insights.
Let’s be honest. This book is not about learning seven languages and adding them to your resumé. No one can really learn that many languages that quickly, but you can be curious enough about them to visit them just as you would visit a city, a mountaintop, or even a continent. Languages are evolving tools, and by attacking non-trivial problems with different tools, you can learn about the essence of them. Then, you can bring those techniques back to your everyday job.
Seven Languages in Seven Weeks is a book about technology adoption. Each language shows a particular programming paradigm, from Ruby’s object-oriented underpinnings to Prolog’s logic programming to Haskell’s type system. The industry is moving toward functional languages, and this exploration can help you understand why.
Technology adoption is one of the central struggles for humankind.
For me, this Pulitzer Prize winner is the ultimate adoption story. It seeks to determine why history unfolded differently on different continents.
The book explains historical narratives beyond rote biological and racial differences. It delves into linguistics, epidemiology, agricultural sciences, and war. It’s one of the few books that doesn’t have a European-centric view of world history.
This book opened my eyes to technology adoption and how it has always played a role, maybe one of the central roles, in world history. The lessons it teaches help me to keep looking deeper for true motivations and determinants of success.
Why did Eurasians conquer, displace, or decimate Native Americans, Australians, and Africans, instead of the reverse? In this "artful, informative, and delightful" (William H. McNeill, New York Review of Books) book, a classic of our time, evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond dismantles racist theories of human history by revealing the environmental factors actually responsible for its broadest patterns.
The story begins 13,000 years ago, when Stone Age hunter-gatherers constituted the entire human population. Around that time, the developmental paths of human societies on different continents began to diverge greatly. Early domestication of wild plants and animals in the Fertile Crescent, China,…
I love adoption, but sometimes I don’t have the energy to read a whole treatise on the subject.
This book is about 100 historical objects, from the Rosetta Stone that helped linguists unlock Egyptian scripts to a throne built out of weapons arising in Mozambique from an African civil war. They span millions of years and six continents, and each object has its own significance.
I love this book because it felt like 100 smaller adoption and conflict stories wrapped into one small package, and I could read one at a time. One of my fondest memories of my daughter was reading her paper copy as we flew from one continent to another.
In 2010, the BBC and the British Museum embarked on an ambitious project: to tell the story of two million years of human history using one hundred objects selected from the Museum's vast and renowned collection. Presented by the British Museum's Director Neil MacGregor, each episode focuses on a single object - from a Stone Age tool to a solar-powered lamp - and explains its significance in human history. Music, interviews with specialists and quotations from written texts enrich the listener's experience. On each CD, objects from a similar period of history are grouped together to explore a common theme…
This was the book that got me into thinking about technology and adoption.
It introduces a framework for thinking about the major groups of people who adopt new technologies. It pays particular attention to the chasm, a difficult adoption challenge that occurs after early adopters accept a technology but before mainstream adoption. Entrepreneurs need to understand these concepts.
This book particularly resonated with me because of my days as an early adopter of the Ruby programming language, and later the Elixir programming language.
I spent years on the conference circuit speaking about programming language adoption, and this book helped me see why these concepts matter.
The bible for bringing cutting-edge products to larger markets--now revised and updated with new insights into the realities of high-tech marketing In Crossing the Chasm, Geoffrey A. Moore shows that in the Technology Adoption Life Cycle--which begins with innovators and moves to early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards--there is a vast chasm between the early adopters and the early majority. While early adopters are willing to sacrifice for the advantage of being first, the early majority waits until they know that the technology actually offers improvements in productivity. The challenge for innovators and marketers is to narrow this…
This story may seem out of place on a list like this one, but allow me to put this second Pulitzer Prize winner into context.
Set at the climax of the Civil War, this book is at once about the forced adoption of new social ideals and the rules we use to govern ourselves. Lay on top of that foundation a story about generals being too slow to come to grips with much more powerful technologies and the delicate storytelling of Shaara, and you have the makings of an amazing story.
This is my favorite book that delicately deals with real people amidst failure. Underneath it all is a study of the failure to adapt to a particularly important technology: tiny grooves in the barrels of rifles that spin bullets. It’s a hard lesson, beautifully told.
“My favorite historical novel . . . a superb re-creation of the Battle of Gettysburg, but its real importance is its insight into what the war was about, and what it meant.”—James M. McPherson
In the four most bloody and courageous days of our nation’s history, two armies fought for two conflicting dreams. One dreamed of freedom, the other of a way of life. Far more than rifles and bullets were carried into battle. There were memories. There were promises. There was love. And far more than men fell on those Pennsylvania fields. Bright futures, untested innocence, and pristine beauty…
Adoption and change often lead to the kind of conflict that regularly breaks people.
I find that creators are often equipped to deal with technical creation, but are rarely equipped to deal with conflict. In this book, Amanda Ripley walks through how several skilled professionals found themselves in conflict.
Then she walks through how those conflicts started, who the players are, how they interact, how to engage in healthy conflict, and eventually how to get back out again.
Many of my peers in open-source technology, especially creators of languages and frameworks, find themselves in conflict and don’t have the tools to deal with it.
This book helped me think of conflict in a systematic way, and how to plot a course back out again.
When we are baffled by the insanity of the "other side"-in our politics, at work, or at home-it's because we aren't seeing how the conflict itself has taken over.
That's what "high conflict" does. It's the invisible hand of our time. And it's different from the useful friction of healthy conflict. That's good conflict, and it's a necessary force that pushes us to be better people.
High conflict, by contrast, is what happens when discord distills into a good-versus-evil kind of feud, the kind with an us and a them. In this state, the normal rules of engagement no longer…
My life and work have been profoundly affected by the central circumstance of my existence: I was born into a very large military Catholic family in the United States of America. As a child surrounded by many others in the 60s, I wrote, performed, and directed family plays with my numerous brothers and sisters. Although I fell in love with a Canadian and moved to Canada, my family of origin still exerts considerable personal influence. My central struggle, coming from that place of chaos, order, and conformity, is to have the courage to live an authentic life based on my own experience of connectedness and individuality, to speak and be heard.
Trapped in her enormous, devout Catholic family in 1963, Annie creates a hilarious campaign of lies when the pope dies and their family friend, Cardinal Stefanucci, is unexpectedly on the shortlist to be elected the first American pope.
Driven to elevate her family to the holiest of holy rollers in the parish, Annie is tortured by her own dishonesty. But when “The Hands” visits her in her bed and when her sister finds herself facing a scandal, Annie discovers her parents will do almost anything to uphold their reputation and keep their secrets safe.
Questioning all she has believed and torn between her own gut instinct and years of Catholic guilt, Annie takes courageous risks to wrest salvation from the tragic sequence of events set in motion by her parents’ betrayal.
