Книги: октябрь

Tracy Kidder, «The Soul of a New Machine»

Книга про группу инженеров Data General, которые спроектировали и в 1980 году выпустили 32-разрядную машину Eclipse MV/8000. Проект сделали всего за полтора года в условиях жесткой конкуренции не только с DEC, но и внутри самой компании. Книга создана писателем-журналистом, который провел все это время вместе с командой: прекрасный образец захватывающего и правдивого повествования в сочетании с технической грамотностью.

Должно быть особенно интересно тем, кто не просто интересуется историей вычислительной техники, но и сам участвовал в проектах с безнадежными сроками.

Looking into the VAX, West had imagined he saw a diagram of DEC’s corporate organization.

No one keeps track the hours we work. That’s not altruism on Data General’s part. If anybody kept track, they’d have to pay us a hell of a lot more than they do.

Wallach spent about twenty hours in the Framingham Public Library ... just in order to add these flourishes [речь об эпиграфах] to his spec. They added something. They revealed the class of feelings that Wallach brought to his job.

The game of programming — and it was a game — was so fascinating.

The mushroom theory of management: put’em in the dark, feed’em shit, and watch’em grow.

Nothing happens unless you push it.

Promising to achieve a nearly impossible schedule was a way of signing up.

Not everything worth doing is worth doing well.

If you say you’re gonna do it in a year and you don’t take it seriously, then it’ll take three years. The game of crazy scheduling is in the category of games that you play on yourself, in order to get yourself to move.

There aren’t that many opportunities in this world to be where the action is, making an impact.

It’s a binary world; the computer might be it’s paradigm. And many engineers seem to be binary people within it. ... It doesn’t matter if you’re ugly or graceless or even half crazy; if you produce right results in this world, your colleges must accept you.

It’s hard to fix something when it’s working.

The first step in fixing something is getting it to break.

The way to stay on schedule is to make another one.

It doesn’t matter how hard you work on something. What counts is finishing and having it work.

Some problems are easy to find and hard to fix; some are hard to find and easy to fix; some go both ways.

That’s the bear trap, the greatest vice. Your job. You can justify just about any behavior with it. Maybe that’s why you do it, so you don’t have to deal with all those other problems.