When I read The Phoenix Project last year, I was smitten. I loved the combination of using fiction to describe how to apply — management and DevOps — theory to true to life situations. So when the publisher asked if I wanted to review the follow-up, I didn’t hesitate. And I can safely say The Unicorn Project is just as much fun as its predecessor. This fiction book takes place… Read More »The Unicorn Project – Gene Kim
foster/ˈfɒstə/verb 1. Encourage the development of (something, especially something desirable). “the teacher’s task is to foster learning” TLDR: I made a personal bookshelf management web application and named it Foster and you can find it here. Here’s what I did — with gifs–, so you might build your own. Name I named it Foster. Because of *this* blog post — it accompanies the application, so it’s self-referential. And also, because… Read More »Foster: how to build your own bookshelf management web application
I remember exactly where I was when, in 2004, I heard that Dutch ad site marktplaats.nl was sold for a staggering 224,5 million euros to eBay. A polder Cinderella story. This success was, however, no accident. Of course, luck was involved, but this is true of all successful businesses. A few years after this deal Bob Crébas (don’t forget the acute accent), wrote down his experiences that lead to this… Read More »Iedere dag vrij – Bob Crébas
Hemingway, the writers’ writer, is famously known for having spent his early years in Paris. Freshly married, this struggling and then unknown writer was honing his craft and subsequently defining what it means to be a writer in a vibrant post World War I Paris. Where he wrote his first big novel. In later life Hemingway wrote up his 5 year experience in a couple of loosely related stories. Which… Read More »A Moveable Feast – Ernest Hemingway
When I started college in 1998 this was literally one of the first books I had to buy. It was part of a — cheaply thrown together — five-pack of paperback management book ‘classics’. And my particular copy is printed on recycled paper, with boring frugal typesetting, and even has a Dutch translation error on the back. Not normally a book you would hold on to for 21 years. Management… Read More »The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People – Stephen Covey
I have written about Tommy Wieringa before. And this little book is once again a clear example of the mans’ writing ability. Effortlessly and thoughtfully he creates a small story — a tragic love story between two people. And this story, of course, unfolds dramatically almost to the point of derailing and then just staying in the tracks. And Wieringa brings it down to a human level. While never overdoing… Read More »Een Mooie Jonge Vrouw – Tommy Wieringa
PHP empowers a gigantic part of the internet. So it is, by definition, a very popular (i.e. prevalent) language. But it also very popular (i.e. well-liked) to dislike PHP as a — serious — language. This could be explained as one of the side effects of that same popularity. With great exposure, comes greater scrutiny. But that would be too easy. Because when discussing PHP as a serious computer programming… Read More »PHP: how did it become so popular?
Roger Thorpe is just as good a writer as Douglas Coupland is. As a matter of fact, he is also as real as a Douglas Coupland character. Glove Pond is his first novel. I got this book bundled with The Gum Thief, and I was thrown off guard by the high praises on the backcover by Coupland himself. How come I had never heard of this writer? But as soon… Read More »Glove Pond – Roger Thorpe
When Gomorrah came out in 2007, apart from spawning a popular TV series, it shook the world. The workings of Italy’s lesser known ‘other mafia’ — the Camorra — are laid bare and Saviano subsequently signed his own death certificate. He has been in hiding ever since. It’s a gut-wrenching mosaic of stories, of how this organisation operates from Naples — mind you, a modern West-European city — and their… Read More »Gomorrah – Roberto Saviano
The rather sensationalist title would normally be a reason to not want to read this book. But since this book came out in 2010, the author E.J. Pfauth has become known for more than just this book. He is the co-founder of the Correspondent (a journalism platform), has written other books and he hosts a rather entertaining podcast. So I thought it would be fun to see where his head… Read More »Sex, Blogs and Rock-‘n-Roll – Ernst Jan Pfauth
Yesterday I wrote a story about how Git is eating the world. And in less than 24 hours more than 10.000 people visited this article! This is not the normal kind of traffic for this site. So that calls for its own article. Not only did the above WordPress plugin tell me I hit 10.000, but my server logs said the same. grep git-is-eating-the-world j11g-access.log|awk ‘{print $1}’|sort -u|wc -l I… Read More »Popular post postmortem
The inception of Git (2005) is more or less the halfway point between the inception of Linux (1991) and today (2019). A lot has happened since. One thing is clear however: software is eating the world and Git is the fork with which it is being eaten. (Yes, pun intended). Linux and Git In 2005, as far as Linus Torvalds’ legacy was concerned, he didn’t need to worry. His pet… Read More »Git is eating the world