Highlight of OSCON: Release of “Team Geek”!

Another highlight of OSCON:

The release (w00t!) of Ben and Fitz‘s new book, Team Geek: A Software Developer’s Guide to Working Well With Others:

Team Geek (cover)

Their talks on How to Handle Poisonous People and The Art of Organizational Manipulation are already famous. In fact, I tried to attend the latter at OSCON, but was turned away at the door because the room was already too crowded and was in danger of violating fire regulations — which gives you a sense of much people want to learn what they have to teach.

Now they’ve written a whole book on “people for geeks”. Things I’m going to start paying more attention to:

  • Avoid the “compliment sandwich” (pp. 74-75). (I guess for metaphorical consistency it should be called a “criticism sandwich”, since a “roast beef” sandwich is not a slice of bread between two pieces of roast beef. Whatever. Just read about it.)
  • Track happiness (p. 76).
  • Look for facts in the bile (p. 96) — particularly useful in technical projects.
  • “Offensive” vs “defensive” work (p. 117).
  • Leave time for learning (p. 20).
  • Why you can’t ignore marketing (pp. 130-133).

Order it directly from O’Reilly Media here.

And Fitz, I’m sorry for being such a clod when we were working on cvs2svn (pp. 20-21, though you didn’t say it that way of course). I got better, I promise.

6 comments

  1. Very funny. You were hardly a clod–that was just the perfect example of two mightily different working styles colliding, and if we hadn’t been such good friends to start, I fear that we’d be mortal enemies today. 🙂

  2. Heh, well, you’re very forgiving. What I meant by “clod” was: of the two of us, the first one to notice that the different working styles were a problem, and to take a step back and talk about it so we could solve it, was you. Now it’s something I watch out for all the time, of course!

  3. Btw, have you noticed how the page number is missing on page 20? Weird omission — I’m baffled trying to think what bug could lead to that result.

  4. I’ve followed Re Bean a little which is how I know about both Fitz, and Ben’s blog ibanjo, thanks to this blog rants I’m now aware they have written a book, I’m over the moon about this release and I’m going to purchase it today 🙂 What’s even more interesting its an O’Reilly publication, this company release books written by the finest sources I will also encourage Mr Ben Collins to write a book about his amateur radio adventures which influenced me to purchase his yaesu radio setup. I would also suggest to Fitz to update his blog as people like me pay regular visits to their site and the information never changes. I wish this book the sale of One Million copies at least!”

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