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I’ve been trying to write a follow up to my last LLM post for nearly a year and all the ideas kind of founder because: a) I think “oh, good another LLM post, just what the world needs”, and b) At the speed I’ve been finishing things lately, the whole world will have changed three times by the time I finish this. Still, it’s now been almost exactly a year since I started using LLMs significantly in…
This was a big month with all kinds of book releases that I had been waiting a long time for. StoryGraph ratings are as of June 7, I think. I read eight books, and I think we’re going to talk about seven of them. A Case of Life and Limb — Sally Smith StoryGraph Rating: 4.19 (6th of 8) My Rating: Double (6th of 8) The sequel to A Case of Mice and Murder which I read last month. I like these books a…
I read nine books in April and we’re going to talk about all of them. Warning: wild swings in tone ahead, as we go from some fairly light books to at least one very, very dark book. The Librarians — Sherry Thomas StoryGraph Rating: 3.51 (9th of 9) My Rating: Single (8th of 9) This was the book that got me interested in comparing StoryGraph ratings to my own, because it looked like the gap between…
On this episode of “When Books Could Code”, we’re talking about the book that probably had the largest single impact effect on my career, Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change by Kent Beck, published in October 1999. I read it in… probably March, 2000. There was a second edition in 2005, we’ll cover that in a later post. This version of the post that you are reading is about my fifth pass…
In 2002, legendary baseball sabermetrician Bill James released Win Shares , his mega-calculation of how to create a single baseball stat that combines everything a player can do to create value. It was not a complete success. The baseball stat that is used these days for combining everything is called WAR, which stands for “Wins over Replacement”. Both stats attempt to summarize a player’s entire…
Yep, we’re doing this again. I read 11 books in March and we might talk about all of them here, depending on how low in my own ratings I’m willing to go… StoryGraph scores are as of June 7, which should give you a sense of how averse I am to actually finishing anything I start these days. Eye of the Bedlam Bride — Matt Dinniman StoryGraph Rating: 4.53 (1st of 11) My Rating: Double (3rd of 11)…
Continuing the month-by-month catchup that I started in January , here are February’s books. I read 8 and I think we’re going to talk about seven of them. As one of those random things, the StoryGraph scores for this month as a whole were lower than January, even though my scores still remain pretty high. Something is up with my own scoring, because my average score is up significantly from last…
I’ve been doing book review posts here for a pretty long time , and I love doing them, but they are somewhat time intensive. I finally remembered the XP approach to work intensive practices, which is to do the job more frequently, in smaller bursts. I’ve been doing that – I’ve been writing reviews of books as I go, but editing my initial rambling into this rambling is what takes most of the time.…
What is this? I’ve spent my whole career fascinated by writing about programming. How do programmers explain what we are doing to each other? How have books written about programming changed the way we work and think? So now I’m writing about programming books. If you think this is somewhat elegiac for the Era of the Programming Book, as the co-author of a 700 page programming book in an era where…
One exciting thing about this year’s book wrap up, at least to me, is that I wrote mini-reviews all year, so these reviews should have a stronger tendency to sound like I actually read the book. And also this will come out in March and not, like, May. Another exciting thing, again, for me, is that I think I finally cracked my personal dilemma about How To Rate Books. So, this is like the nerdiest…