Emergency: This Book Will Save Your Life – Neil Strauss
I read this book because a group of us were moving to China, just as Trump was getting voted in to be President of the USA and various military exercises(?) were taking place by both America and China that seemed .. awkward. What would we do if something happened? Where would we go? How would we get there? I didn’t know what I didn’t know and now after reading this book I now know a little bit more about what I still don’t know!
The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work – Scott Berkun
The Year Without Pants is an insightful look in to Scott’s year working as a team lead for WordPress and Automattic’s company culture that allows remote work. What’s most interesting about it, is the culture works! Running a remote team successfully can be incredibly difficult at scale. Their culture was unconventional, employees are independent, working from wherever they wished and most interestingly, rarely using email to communicate.
The book makes a great case for why remote work can work, especially if you consider how much time at a traditional workplace is spent purely through the computer. I know for myself I could actually spend days during a busy project not speaking to a single soul in my office and just working through the day on my computer and collaborating with the team on IRC and Skype whilst handling tickets in Jira. The principle is sound and in my opinion the things that make it a success or not are employee commitment and competence and the company culture and processes. A remote team with a paranoid and suspicious company culture will never work.
git push matching vs simple
Recently I built some new infrastructure and started to see messages like this in my Git environments.
Git 2.0 from 'matching' to 'simple'. To squelch this message and maintain the current behavior after the default changes, use: git config --global push.default matching To squelch this message and adopt the new behavior now, use: git config --global push.default simple
Decisions, decisions. What exactly is the difference between matching and simple Git push?
docker: Error response from daemon: Cannot link to /compose_mysql_1, as it does not belong to the default network.
I’ve been doing a lot of work with Docker recently, infact this website, Remote CTO, is currently running in a Docker container, well 3, one for Nginx, one for PHP-FPM and one for MySQL. Soon there might be a fourth, for either Redis or Memcache, I haven’t decided yet!
I do a lot of cool stuff at the command line. e.g using WP-CLI to manage my WordPress installations.
Peter Diamandis – Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World
Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World by Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler was fantastic to read after Exponential Organizations and Abundance. If Exponential Organizations discussed the problems and Abundance discussed the solutions, Bold can be thought of as discussing the implementation!
The world’s biggest problems = biggest business opportunities.
Like the previous 2 books, Bold is incredibly optimistic about the future. The first section discusses the 6 ‘D’s of exponentials
Peter Diamandis – Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think
Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think by Peter Diamandis is a fantastic, tackling the world’s largest and most important problems such as overpopulation, food, water, energy, education, health care and freedom.
This is probably the most optimistic book I’ve ever read.
In today’s hyperlinked world, solving problems anywhere, solves problems everywhere.
Abundance is a great follow up to Exponential Organizations as a lot of the techniques covered to solve the worlds largest problems involve exponential thinking as the human race is growing exponentially.
Salim Ismail – Exponential Organizations: Why new organizations are ten times better, faster, cheaper than yours (and what to do about it)
Salim Ismail – Exponential Organizations: Why new organizations are ten times better, faster, cheaper than yours (and what to do about it) is the first of 3 books I’ve read recently, all stemming from Singularity University, and was full of big thinking around what exponential organisations are and case studies of how some were formed, how they scaled and problems that they went on to solve.
I don’t have an MBA in business, I’m a computer nerd who’s worked with successful startups and large enterprise companies, so I still have a lot to learn and this book filled a few gaps with solid explanations. e.g. obviously I’ve been exposed to the waterfall model of software development (since 1997..) but wasn’t aware of the formal New Product Development process, or NPD, which includes the following steps:
The Science Of Amazon Ranking Graphs And Why They Are Important
A few people have recently mentioned to me that they don’t understand the usefulness of tools like Amazooka or AMZ Tracker for tracking their products, after all tracking a products BSR or rankings for a particular keyword doesn’t lead to more sales, so I’m going to describe how I use them and why I find them to be important for my business.
Really I should have written this 3 months ago as a lot of people have also been asking about sales drops the last few months due to being in Q3. If these same people had graphs of their BSR and keyword rankings, and knew how to read them, they wouldn’t be asking these questions.
Robert B Cialdini – Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion
Anyone doing any kind of marketing should read this book, period. Covering 6 key principles of influence, Robert Cialdini is a committed genius who not only uses scientific case studies to back up the principles he describes, but also real world experience, having ‘gone under cover’ working in restaurants, etc. to observe influence in action! Not only do you see how the principles play out but Robert goes in to detail about how your mindset can help you not fall for them when used as a marketing tactic.