I consume a copious quantity of reading material, from books to research papers. Below you'll find a list of some that I think are interesting or useful in my professional life. If you have any recommendations, shoot me a message.


The Joy of UX

David Platt

The Joy of UX book coverA good (re)introduction to usability and user experience. I found the concept of personas a good tool to help define the user experience. The 10 commandments in chapter seven are good guidelines for designing a user-centric interface. The chapter on telemetry has a reasonably good explanation of what metrics to collect. There is also a brief discussion of the number of users that are required to run a good usability test and it was much lower than I expected. The author suggests that 3 test users are a reasonable minimum number. Finally, the two case studies tie the concepts together using real-world examples using the various techniques.

Peopleware - Productive Projects and Teams

Tom DeMarco & Timothy Lister

Peopleware - Productive Products and TeamsThis was one of the first books I read when I started managing a team and I can't recommend it enough. Peopleware is one of those books that you hear referenced over and over in our industry and it's for good reason. It reinforced the hazy, roughly-defined idea of what type of manager I wanted to be, and provided a solid basis for what made a good team work effectively, productively and happily together. I still pull it off my shelf periodically for a refresher.

The Year Without Pants

Scott Berkun

The-year-without-pantsThe Year Without Pants is a humorous insight into how Automattic runs, from a new team lead's perspective. It's a great read for anyone interested in Automattic's unconventional, effective and distributed management philosphy. Actually, it's a pretty great read for anyone, but I think it'll be most appreciated by software folks. This book really reinforced my belief that remote teams are the future and that being a remote team doesn't mean sacrificing relationships, collaboration or company culture.