I think the true sign of how a book resonates with you is with how many people you think about while reading it. For me, the best books I read leave me saying, “This person needs to read this book … and this person, and this person, and this person.” Well, I could think of about eight people who needed to read Michael Lopp’s Managing Humans while I was going through it, which says, “Hey, Rands knows his shit.” In fact, I just bought my third copy on Friday: my program manager has my copy, but only after I let Stephen borrow it and read it first; my director down in Houston plans on passing it around to several managers at the customer/teammate [!]; the third copy is going to go to my manufacturing engineer and her husband. Her husband will be the first software person I’ve actually had read it.

Now, if you know the subject [or the subtitle], you’re saying, “He’s a software middle manager. How does that relate to what you do, NASA nerd?” Please. Software is a high-cost, low-volume business—ignore the fact that one copy of software can be sold a million times. Ideally, software development of the style that Rands discusses is high-dollar, low-vol stuff—exactly the business that I’m in over in manned spaceflight hardware. If we build ten of something, it’s a lot. We’ve got a fundamentally creative process going on, and we get the same crunches and crazy stuff that software dev teams like Rands’s get. [Like, um, my week this week: deliver hardware to foreign customer tomorrow, finalize overseas shipment/export control paperwork on Tuesday, polish the program review charts on Wednesday, have a program review Thursday morning before hopping a plane to Houston for a system requirements review on Friday, then return back here Saturday morning and walk right over to the shop, because hey, next Monday? Fit check before we deliver that hardware in another ten days so it can fly on Shuttle in January. Hooah.]

Obviously, there are things that don’t really apply. [You might think that all the stuff about version control doesn't apply, but ... you've never seen NASA-level configuration management. Honestly, it stuns me that we don't have VCS stuff in place at the pre-deliverable phase. It would make lives much, much easier.] But there is so much that does apply, because … people are people everywhere, and the smart, gifted, creative that you see in software also flock to manned spaceflight, for the same “I want to change the world” reasons—just a different application.

Oh, for the record … I’m an organic, holistic, incrementalist Sally Synthesizer. Most of the time. This is a change for me in a couple ways—I used to be more of a completionist and more of an inward, but … well, the last year has changed me, in ways I will never blog about because doing so requires talking about work I’m doing that I won’t talk about in much more than the abstract or, well, posting press releases or something. But that’s not to say that I won’t tell you a story over a Smithwick’s at Mason’s Pub.