Books That Need Updates

You even read The Mythical Man-Month by Fred Brooks? It’s one of those classics for a reason, and it’s one of those books—like PeopleWare that I end up re-reading every could of years. For everyone playing the home game , Man-Month is a collection of essay’s Fred Brooks wrote about software engineering, mostly based on his experiences leading the OS/360 project at IBM in the 50s and 60s. The book is probably best known for “Brooks’ Law”—“Adding more people to a late project makes it later,” and he’s probably the origin of the example of how you can’t use 9 women to have a baby in one month. But he’s all over the software world: he’s also the guy who coined the term “software architecture”, and he’s almost certainly the reason your computer uses 8 bit bytes instead of 6.

He’s also got an real gift at digging out the root cause of problems, so while the symptoms he describes are very 1950s (the secretaries can only type so fast!) what makes the book stay relevant is his ability to call out the underlying needs (everyone on a large project needs up-to-date information.)

However! The version you can buy today is the anniversary edition from the mid-90s, with a couple of new chapters at the end. And these are incredible because it’s Brooks with a couple of extra decades of experience under his belt in dialoge with his younger self. And he mostly walks through the challenges and problems the earlier parts of the book outlined, and then gives his updated thoughts on where we stood in the mid-90s. (A remarkable number of logistical challenges went away just due to, literally, Microsoft Office.)

But this afterward mostly lets him sharpen the messages from earlier—these really are the real problems, all the social and communication challenges are the same no matter how fancy the technology, there really isn’t a silver bullet, here’s how we can go make great software.

It’s phenomenal, go read it if you haven’t.

Sometimes I think, what other books really need an anniversary edition with an extra chapter?

As I somewhat frequently mention, the all time champion is Postcards From The Edge, which really needs an extra page at the end to mention that Debbie Reynolds died the day after Carrie Fisher, so Carrie couldn’t even have her own funeral.

Which all brings me around to—probably for the last time—Humane. (Bare with me for a sec.) After the total disaster of the “AI” “Pin” launch, the company seems to be up for sale, the founders want out, looks like it was time to fold the con.

One of the main people at Humane was Ken Kocienda, aka “the guy who wrote the first iPhone keyboard". After leaving Apple he wrote a book called Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs. It’s a great book, and probably the best book that’s ever been written about how the early 2000s Apple did what it did. But a big part of the tone is that Apple has lost its way without Jobs there, and this book was a record of how the “good” Apple worked.

A big part of Humane’s whole thing was that it was a bunch of ex-Apple people re-creating the old Apple, and they literally had the guy who wrote the book on staff. But maybe, it turns out, the deranged dictator CEO with impeccable taste was a key element in making the Apple way work? Humane struck me as a place that didn’t have someone who would drop the prototype in a fishtank to see if bubbles came out. And not that you need that to be successful? But you don’t not need that? Humane stands as a really interesting data point about how the Apple Way works, or doesn’t, outside of the confines of Apple itself.

But back to Kocienda’s book. Like I said, it’s a great book. And I mean this completely sincerely, without any implied snark: I’d pay real money to read the extra couple of chapters Kocienda would add now.

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