books - Cody Django Redmond

Cody Django Redmond

books

A collection of 17 posts

Missing from my bookshelf: the 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership

This book was recently recommended to me from Bryan Dunn, the VP of Product at Crowdbotics. It arrived at my door on Saturday, and I started reading it immediately. My general approach to a new book is to first read the intro and conclusion – this generally gives me a good

Scaling People: Tactics for Management and Company Building

In addition to my new role at Crowdbotics, I've also started reading a recently published book on scaling people management. It was written by Claire Hughes Johnson - former COO of Google and Stripe. I'm excited because it purports to be a pragmatic take on management, complete with templates and

Business books that are also enjoyable

A friend is transitioning from service industry to project management. She's looking to get into tech, and even through she's very tech-minded, she feels insecure about her lack of experience in the business. I offered to put together a list of books that would be valuable in introducing common business

On writing well

On writing well

I've long been obsessed with the relationship that writers have with writing. This first came to bare reading Henry Miller, finding it curious that his memoirs were chock-full of stories and yet would rarely mention a practice of writing, surely an activity that consumed him during his twenties. Writing is

Willpower and self-control

Over the last week I read "The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do to Get More of It [https://www.amazon.ca/Willpower-Instinct-Self-Control-Works-Matters/dp/1583335080] ". I liked this book more than I thought I would. I was expecting a run-of-the-mill productivity book, but

My favorite books on Engineering Leadership

A few people have asked, so here it is. I haven't read every book out there, so please tweet at me if I'm missing good ones! 1. Peopleware [https://www.amazon.com/Peopleware-Productive-Projects-Tom-DeMarco/dp/0932633439] by Tom DeMarko and Timothy Lister. This is the classic. Originally published in 1987, the

So many books, so little time

Wow, the last few months have been a wild ride. The switch to a new company has been challenging and exciting and rewarding and maybe some day I'll tell you about it. For now, things aren't looking to slow down. My posts are likely to take on more of a

how f'd up is your management?

Saw this one on amazon when perusing books on agile and team management, took a chance on the kindle version. Surprisingly relevant -- I seem to be on a very similar track as Johnathan Nightingale, although maybe five or ten years behind him. A lot of his startup experience resonated

phoenix project

I have a renewed interest in Agile. I suppose the last few years of "corporate" software projects have left a.. taste in my mouth. Agile at startups seemed much easier to implement, since the teams were smaller and had already bought in to the process. We shared the goal of

mindset

I just finished reading Carol S. Dweck's "mindset", and I wish I could have read it years ago! Does a wonderful job providing a mental model for wetware refactoring. I'm always looking for tricks to curb my reptile brain, and this book was full of them. Also, it was written

The Peripheral

Woah. William Gibson's newest does not disappoint. A hard-edge sci-fi premise told with his signature style and grit. As usual, it requires a very close read, but the dividends are worth it. There really are so few authors who can follow-through so masterfully on such cool ideas. The impression I

Handmaid's Tale

The first book I've read in 2017 is "The Handmaid's Tale" by Margaret Atwood. It's a work of speculative fiction set in the Republic of Gilead, a dystopic totalitarian theocracy which has taken control of a United States beset with environmental disasters and a plunging birthrate. Society has been restructured

Blogging retrospective

I started with the idea of using this blog to capture things I accomplish throughout the year. The idea was to simply and quickly capture them as they come up, so that by the end of the year I'd have a record of music tracks I released, books I read,

Science fiction for the win

This year has not seen a marked improvement in the quality or quantity of my writing on this blog. I had kinda hoped I'd be writing more, but didn't really commit to any metric. But there was at least one goal that I seem to have succeeded in: reading more.

Science fiction

"He, She, and It" blew my mind. It's as cyberpunk as anything else I've read, but also deep in identity, emotion and mythology. Not to mention that the conceptions of the future (as written in 1991) are simply uncanny. I've since picked up "Women on the Edge of Time", written

Cryptonomicon

Finally. Finished. This one took me a little while. Not necessarily a difficult read; definitely enthralling. The sheer volume of the book, with all the characters, places, timelines, histories, mythologies, is staggering. Stephenson weaves it together like a magician. Hard to belive this came out in 1999, it feels just

Reamde by Neil Stephenson

I was quite disappointed about losing my Kindle, back in November. At least until I realized I had Reamde sitting on a bookshelf. I had purchased them both around the same time, promptly placing the Kindle in my bag and the book on the shelf, where I basically just forgot