Recoding America
Book description
Learn more about Jennifer Pahlka's work at recodingamerica.us.
"The book I wish every policymaker would read."
-Ezra Klein, The New York Times
A bold call to reexamine how our government operates-and sometimes fails to-from President Obama's former deputy chief technology officer and the founder of Code for America
Just when…
Why read it?
1 author picked Recoding America as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
Although I don’t work in government, this is a book I’ll come back to whenever I need a reminder to put user needs ahead of process or wisdom about how to work inside a large bureaucracy to make that happen. Where Meltdown focuses on spectacular blow-ups, this book explores run-of-the-mill failures—like long, complicated online forms and websites that only load in specific, outdated browsers. (Though bigger failures, like the launch of healthcare.gov, get airtime too.)
I appreciated this book’s thoughtful analysis of how government software gets built—it goes beyond the stereotype of the incompetent government employee and digs into the…
From Nora's list on systems and system failures for programmers.
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