Reading for pleasure is one of those things that I seem to do less than I’d like. One of the big reasons is that I’m a reading adrenalin junkie. I’ve done this to myself. For a long time, I’d read nothing but those catastrophe at sea, stranded on the top of a mountain, dying in the forest, non-fiction books. It’s embarrassing, but I’ve gotten so that if the main character doesn’t stave off starvation by eating their recently-dead best friend for lunch in the middle of the southern ocean with no hope of survival, I’m not really interested. And that’s just non-fiction. If it’s fiction, it’s got to be even more shocking to keep me interested. If someone "made up" the story it better be about sex-crazed junkie bank robbing circus freaks, staving off starvation by eating their recently-dead best friend for lunch in the middle of the southern ocean.
Well, that being said, I tore through Coding Slave. Something about it just clicked with me. It’s funny, but in a way it’s very similar to these catastrophe at sea books. Only that the catastrophe is the current state of software development and we’re all in the same boat.
Coding Slave describes, very accurately, what happens to us as software developers. The cast of characters is great: a decadent, over-paid jet-setting consultant, a true coder struggling to fit into the corporate coding environment, and a brilliant highly educated foreign-born female engineer willing to do anything for her clients.
Everything happens in this book. There’s a murder. A suicide. A murder-suicide. Sex. Scandal. The FBI. More sex. It’s just great.
But that’s not the point at all. The entire book, in a way, is a stage for Reselman to tell you his vision for how to fix the current mess in our profession : broken software, budget overruns, redundant efforts, poor quality of life, lack of respect, imposters, un-equal compensation, under-compensation: the whole nine.
I’m an idealist. So’s Reselman. I think It’s good to be an idealist, but then again, and idealist would. So suffice it to say, I’m totally into the ideas he has for us in Coding Slave. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that Coding Slave is the Walden of the modern age. Okay, maybe it’s more like Skinner’s Walden Two, than Thoreau’s Walden. But it does propose a utopia of sorts. So the question becomes, could the utopia proposed in coding slave work?
Well, people have tried to implement Skinner’s ideas from Walden Two, and they work, um sort of, but you don’t see us all working four-hour days and spending the rest of our time painting. I, for one, would like to try out Reselman’s ideas. Then again I’d go live in Walden Two: I’m an idealist.
Now, the book’s too good to get nitpicky about style. Stylistically, Kurt Vonnegut comes to mind, a little too much at times. Perhaps this is just coincidence. But, then again I love Vonnegut. It’s kinda like this book was tailor made for me.
My one big gripe is that the book literally fell apart twice on me. The binding sucks. It’s slapped together with that plastic ring binding we use for code docs. Perhaps this was intentional. This was annoying because I had to stop reading to re-assemble the darn thing. Well, hopefully the next printing will be perfect bound.
So, can you tell I liked it? .
-Brendan