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Daily Productive Sharing 357 - Ask Your Developer

Daily Productive Sharing 357 - Ask Your Developer
Photo by Pawel Czerwinski / Unsplash

One helpful tip per day:)

(下附中文版)

#reading

Today's share is a technical book recommendation by Gergely Orosz, 95 books in total, including many that we have recommended:

  1. The Manager's Path by Camille Fournier
  2. Ask Your Developer by Jeff Lawson
  3. The Effective Engineer by Edmond Lau
  4. A Philosophy of Software Design by John Ousterhout
  5. Designing Data Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann
  6. Thinking in Systems by Donella H. Meadows
  7. Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software by Charles Pretzold
  8. Kubernetes in Action by Marko Luksa
  9. Measure What Matters by John Doerr
  10. The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz
  11. Good Strategy/Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt
  12. Creativity, Inc by Ed Catmull
  13. Think Again by Adam Grant
  14. Nonviolent Communication by Marshall B. Rosenberg

The most helpful technical book I've read this year is Ask Your Developer by Jeff Lawson. This book focuses on how to help non-technical readers understand the use and impact of technology in a variety of industries, i.e., digital transformation. Jeff is the CEO of Twilio, and is a tech-business man of many trades:

  1. Jeff was a programmer himself, and after starting different companies, large and small, he decided to go to AWS to learn how mature technology companies work, and left AWS after two years to start a new business.
  2. when Jeff first joined AWS, he attended an all-hands meeting, where Jeff Bezos emphasized that Amazon was a technology company, not a retail company, despite the fact that Amazon had a large number of employees who had jumped over from Walmart and other retail businesses.
  3. Jeff emphasized the concept of build or die, that is, in the digital transformation, to transform thoroughly, to build their own software like a technology company.
  4. what specific software should be built in house? Jeff gave a very simple judgment criteria, all user-oriented tools should be developed by themselves, which can quickly respond to customer needs. If they are purchased or outsourced, they will basically be dragged to death by these tools.
  5. He mentioned that the original experiment was at the technical level, such as how the White brothers experimented to build an airplane. For modern software companies, the cost of technology experimentation is very low because of the large number of open-source tools and third-party APIs available. Hence, for these companies, it's not really about experimenting with technology, but experimenting with how to use technology to solve business problems.
  6. he said to build a good relationship with programmers: share the problem not the solution. If you do not understand the specific technology, do not point fingers, tell the programmers the problem you need to solve, and trust them to figure out how to solve it. Instead of telling programmers what to do and how to do it.
  7. Finally, he also attaches great importance to infrastructure building, and in Twilio's case, every dollar invested in platform building will eventually yield more than five dollars. Of course, they also follow the paved road principle, which means that the platform provides a common solution that guarantees users a fast and safe delivery, but the platform does not force users to use these solutions; users can also use other solutions to solve their own problems. The former is like driving on a paved road, while the latter is like driving off-road.

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今天的分享是由 Gergely Orosz 带来的技术书籍推荐，一共有95本，其中也有不少我们推荐过的：

  1. The Manager's Path by Camille Fournier
  2. Ask Your Developer by Jeff Lawson
  3. The Effective Engineer by Edmond Lau
  4. A Philosophy of Software Design by John Ousterhout
  5. Designing Data Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann
  6. Thinking in Systems by Donella H. Meadows
  7. Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software by Charles Pretzold
  8. Kubernetes in Action by Marko Luksa
  9. Measure What Matters by John Doerr
  10. The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz
  11. Good Strategy/Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt
  12. Creativity, Inc by Ed Catmull
  13. Think Again by Adam Grant
  14. Nonviolent Communication by Marshall B. Rosenberg

今年读过的技术书里，对我帮助最大的是 Jeff Lawson 写的 Ask Your Developer。这本书着眼于如何帮助非技术背景的读者了解技术在各行各业的应用及影响，也就是数字化转型。 Jeff 是 Twilio 的 CEO，可谓技术商业两者通吃：

  1. Jeff 自己是程序员出身，创立了大大小小不同的公司之后，决定跑到 AWS 学习成熟技术公司如何运作的，两年之后离开了 AWS，开始新的创业征程；
  2. Jeff 刚进 AWS，就参加了一场全员大会，也就是 Jeff Bezos 强调了 Amazon 是一家技术公司，而不是零售公司，尽管当时 Amazon 有大量从沃尔玛等零售业跳槽过来的员工；
  3. Jeff 强调 build or die 的概念，也就是在数字化转型中，要转型得彻底，要像技术公司那样去搭建自己的软件；
  4. 具体哪些软件应该 in house 搭建呢？ Jeff 给出了一个很简单的判断标准，凡是面向用户的工具都应该自己开发，这样才能快速响应客户的需求。如果是采购或者外包，基本会被这些工具拖死。
  5. 他提到，原先的试验是在技术层面的，不如怀特兄弟如何试验造出飞机。对于现代软件公司而言，技术试验的成本非常低，因为可以使用大量开源工具和第三方 API。所以对于这些公司而言，真正要试验的不是技术问题，而是如何使用技术来解决商业问题。
  6. 他说要和程序员建立好关系的话：share the problem not the solution. 也就是说如果你不懂具体技术的话，就不要指手画脚，把你需要解决的问题告诉程序员，信任他们想办法去解决。而不是告诉程序员去做什么，怎么做。
  7. 最后他也非常重视平台建设，就 Twilio 而言，每往平台建设投资一块钱，最终的收益会超过五块钱。当然他们也奉行 paved road principle，也就是说，平台提供通用的解决方案，这个方案可以保证使用者快捷安全地交付，但平台方不会强制使用者使用这些方案；使用者也可以使用其他方案来解决自己的问题。前者就像是在 paved road 上行驶，而后者像是在越野驾驶。

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