Books Recommended by Scott Johnson
Read the interview: Scott Johnson
In Scott Johnson’s words:
If you're interested in high tech as a career path then I'd recommend a series of case studies around the development of products / founding of companies. Here are four examples:
- Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder (1981)
- Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure by Jerry Kaplan (1996)
- Show Stopper by G Pascal Zachary (1994)
- The Launch Pad: Inside Y Combinator by Randall Stross (2013)
- The Everything Store by Brad Stone (2014)
These books all tell the tale of starting a company or building a product and despite covering a time span of 30+ years and multiple generations of technology the remarkable thing is just how very, very similar they are. While the technology changes, the process of creating something from whole cloth doesn't. That's a great lesson for people to learn.
9 books recommended by Scott Johnson
The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon
by Brad Stone
If you're interested in high tech as a career path then I'd recommend a series of case studies around the development of products / founding of companies. Here are 5 examples: Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder (1981) Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure… Read the full quote
If you're interested in high tech as a career path then I'd recommend a series of case studies around the development of products / founding of companies. Here are 5 examples:
- Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder (1981)
- Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure by Jerry Kaplan (1996)
- Show Stopper by G Pascal Zachary (1994)
- The Launch Pad: Inside Y Combinator by Randall Stross (2013)
- The Everything Store by Brad Stone (2014)
These books all tell the tale of starting a company or building a product and despite covering a time span of 30+ years and multiple generations of technology the remarkable thing is just how very, very similar they are. While the technology changes, the process of creating something from whole cloth doesn't. That's a great lesson for people to learn.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values
In the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig covers the process by which technical documentation actually gets written and the level of stupidity that it illustrated thoroughly convinced me that documentation for any product I created needed to actually be good… Read the full quote
In the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig covers the process by which technical documentation actually gets written and the level of stupidity that it illustrated thoroughly convinced me that documentation for any product I created needed to actually be good and not subject to this type of process. I read this back in 1988 when I first had to write documentation for a product and 30 years later I still remember it.
The Soul of a New Machine
by Tracy Kidder
Tracy Kidder's The Soul of a New Machine. This was the first book that really took a deep dive into the process of creating a high tech product from scratch. Tracy really humanized the engineering process and made me realize that was the type of industry where I wanted to be.
What You See Is What You Get: My Autobiography
by Alan Sugar
I'm currently reading a biography of Alan Sugar, a U.K. entrepreneur who created Amstrad from scratch. I'm trying to get my creative juices flowing on launching a new product and this very much sets that tone.
American Gods
by Neil Gaiman
American Gods by Neil Gaiman. This is a brilliant thought experiment about what happens to a god when its believers stop believing. My preferred edition is the 10th Anniversary release with expanded text.
PHP and MySQL Web Development
by Luke Welling, Laura Thomson
I spent a ton of years doing mostly product management as opposed to software engineering (what I do now). Although I had written code and managed engineers, I wasn't really a hands on software engineer. In the wake of the dot com crisis, when everyone… Read the full quote
I spent a ton of years doing mostly product management as opposed to software engineering (what I do now). Although I had written code and managed engineers, I wasn't really a hands on software engineer. In the wake of the dot com crisis, when everyone was unemployed, when an unexpected software engineering gig landed on me, the book PHP and MySQL Web Development by Luke Welling and Laura Thompson literally taught me database backed web development. Oddly enough, two years later, I ended up marrying one of the book's editors. If I hadn't read that book, I wouldn't have ended up speaking at the PHP conference where I met my wife and I would not be married to her (or have my kids). That one book took me down the Open Source path and while I've changed languages (Ruby / Rails), it literally changed every single aspect of my life.
