Planet SCM

As someone who has spent a small fortune on books over the years, this paragraph from Seth Godin's recent post on How to read a business book has me wanting to expand on this topic:

Computer books, of course, are nothing but bullet points. Programmers get amazing value because for $30 they are presented with everything they need to program a certain tool. Yet most programmers are not world class, precisely because the bullet points aren’t enough to get them to see things the way the author does, and not enough to get them motivated enough to actually program great code.

Seth's Blog: How to read a business book

In Seth's post, he writes, "If you’re reading for the recipe, and just the recipe, you can get through a business book in just a few minutes." The same can be said for most of the "computer books" on the market. I can only think of a few books related to software development that I've read cover-to-cover. The rest I treated as software development recipe books. I suspect that I'm not alone in doing that. However, I think one premise of Seth's bit about "computer books" is not always valid, which is that these books are written by world-class programmers. Some authors are just good at aggregating a bunch of useful content in one place - creating recipe books. There are some great authors who are world-class programmers. They add a lot of value above and beyond what you could discover for yourself in the product documentation. They write the books I'll buy based solely on the strength of the author's brand. Their books are worth of cover-to-cover reading; however, they are the exception.

Who are your favorite authors?

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Successful blogs, like successful journalists, are usually associated with a particular beat. For example, Mary-Jo Foley has worked the Microsoft beat for a couple of decades. Four years ago, I started this blog to write a bit about Team System. When this blog had its highest throughput, I was working the Team System beat nearly full time while also doing my day job. Since then, my role at Microsoft has changed a couple of times and I find myself further from the Team System Fountain of Truth. I had hoped that my new roles would lead me to more opportunities to cover Visual Studio to the same level I covered Team System, but that's too broad for me and Soma hits all the highlights. Since I don't feel like I have a beat to cover, or at least cover well, I'm thinking it's time to stop posting to this blog. No guarantee I will, but if I do, thanks for reading!

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Just a quick post to commemorate my ninth anniversary at Microsoft. I spent time on Friday getting rid of several boxes of accumulated clutter, including a bunch of printed specs for projects that never happened. I even found two drawings my daughter created almost 9 years ago. And now she's in college. Time flies.

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It occurred to me this evening that I haven't posted to this blog since early February. Following the launch of Visual Studio 2008 last month in LA, I moved into a new role (still within Developer Marketing at Microsoft) to work on marketing communications for our broader developer & user experience marketing campaigns. In addition, I'm still working on the Visual Studio marketing site and adding new content. As painful as it was to create, I still like how the product comparison guide turned out. Yesterday, we published a new white paper on Requirements Management with Visual Studio Team System. Anyway, back to the grind...

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Earlier this year (Managing Complexity) I blogged about John Maeda's book, The Laws of Simplicity (Simplicity: Design, Technology, Business, Life). Now you can watch a presentation he did around the same time at TED.

The MIT Media Lab's John Maeda lives at the intersection of technology and art -- a place that can get very complicated. Here, he talks about paring down to basics, and how he creates clean, elegant art, websites and web tools. In his book Laws of Simplicity, he offers 10 rules and 3 keys for simple living and working -- but in this talk, he boils it down to one simply delightful way to be.

Source: TED | TEDBlog: Simply John Maeda, on TED.com

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You may be familiar with Windows Marketplace, which is one way you can sell downloads of your software online. As you would expect, you get paid when someone buys your software through the site. If you haven't added your software title to Windows Marketplace yet, see the Windows Marketplace Partner Page to learn how.

A little known fact is that you can actually get paid twice. By becoming a Windows Marketplace Affiliate, you also get paid a commission (up to 7.5%) when customers you send to Windows Marketplace purchase digital downloads of your software, and other titles, such as Windows and Office.

Even if you don't sell any software titles of your own, you can still become an affiliate. Then you can earn commissions by promoting downloads of other people's software through Windows Marketplace on your site.

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