The Phoenix Project – 5 reasons why you should read it!

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tl;dr: buy it here!  ;-)

#1: It’s well-written

First of all, I won’t pretend that I’m able to judge the book’s literary quality as English is not my mother tongue. But the read is really gripping and absorbing and it’s quite hard to stop reading it, you want to devour it! The authors managed to find the right tone and the right pace to tell an 300-ish pages IT story,  which is a performance in itself!

#2: It’s real

Well, almost :-) Even if this novel is a fiction the story sounds pretty real. It tells things that will certainly resonate with you if you’ve been involved in an IT project. Whether you are a developer, a project leader, part of the operation team, member of the compliance department, the security guy or even the CEO, it will certainly remind your own past experiences.

#3: It’s unique

As far as I know, it’s the only one of its kind. I’ve read Commitment by Olav Maassen, Chris Matts and Chris Geary but it’s a picture novel (and by the way, go get your copy if you haven’t read it yet!). There’s also The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt and The Gold Mine by Freddy and Michael Ballé but even if I did not read them (yet!) they seem both more business oriented (correct me if I’m wrong!).

#4: It strikes home

If you’re in the situation the main character is facing at the beginning of the book, then you will obviously have some ideas to get things better. Some of you might realize that your fate is not fixed and that there are other way to work, more efficiently!

#5: It’s not just limited to the finding

As the story goes on, you might learn about new things. You’ll discover the power of DevOps and Continuous Delivery just to name a few. You’ll find out what the Value Stream is all about and how to increase its efficiency. What Lean can bring you.

Get your copy!

Buy cheaper books!

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Every week plenty of interesting books are released.

Besides the fact that I don’t have the time to read them all, it could start to be quite expensive trying to buy them all!

That’s why I became a big fan of “early release” programs most of the publishers are offering.

O’Reilly, Apress, Manning … they all have their own program which basically offers the same kind of things: an early access to a still-in-development version of forthcoming titles at a lower price!

The nice thing is that as soon as you bought an early release ebook, you will be warned about new version as they become available for download. You’ll even receive (most of the time) the completed ebook as soon as it got released.

Check-out the current roster of available early release books from:

Do no forget to also have a look at Leanpub catalogue. Some of their books are work in progress too (I did not find a specific section on their site, though) You’ll also be warned as soon as a new version is online and you’ll be able to download the final version for free. They have some really reasonably priced bundles, nice free books to download and you can even set your price for paid version!

Happy Reading!

Embrace ravines and get out of your comfort zone!

I recently finished the book “Notes to a Software Team Leader: Growing Self Organizing Teams” by Roy Osherove.

This book has been advised by Simon Brown during his “Agility and the essence of software architecture” ‘s talk at the Craft Conference in Budapest (you can find an abridged feedback here).

Simon was referring to this book as it contains useful recipes and tips on how to move from the survival to the self organizing team phase and what kind of leadership style you need to adapt during this multi steps process. The final goal being having a team that did learn how to learn and which is mature enough to bring software architecture back to its developers.

Even if all this was very interesting, what was really inspiring for me in Roy’s book, was something I did not expect to find in it. It took me by surprise ;-)

Throughout the book, Roy speaks about the comfort zone. That zone where we are taking no risk, avoiding the changes. That zone we don’t want to go out because we have fear of the unknown.  The fact is that we’ll never grow that much staying there…

In the Learning to learn chapter, Roy wrote something that really striked home:

I think the true power of learning is to realize this simple fact: ravines eventually end and you are left with new knowledge. If you know this, you can start doing something incredible: you can begin plotting out future ravines that you might choose to fall into. You can plan your life as a series of learnings through ravines that you have carefully calculated to benefit you.

Climbing those ravines might hurt a bit but I’m quite sure that what you’ll see when you’ll look back where you were before, is worth the look!

Read that book and go where the magic happens!  :-)

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Thanks Houssam for the picture!