Week 205: Pragmatic Book Club
August 7, 2022
- They’ve stopped having fines for late returns on kids books at the library. It’s good that they’ve stopped doing that. Now I think about that it makes me pretty ragin’ that there were ever late fines for children’s books in the first place, not because I minded paying them, but because they disproportionately impact low income families, the library is pretty much the only free indoor thing to do with kids, and what’s a good thing to encourage all children to do? Read.
- The book club that I started at work, hence forth known as the Pragmatic Book Club had it’s first meeting to discuss chapter one this week. Because I have no idea what my content strategy is, I have blogged about the finer points of setting up a book club over on the FT’s medium publication.
- The meeting itself was great! We split into breakout rooms using the Google Meet feature and so I got to be in a smaller group and we had a fairly in-depth chat about the chapter and how the concepts applied or didn’t to the FT.
- One thing about The Pragmatic Programmer that I didn’t notice first time around but now is very obvious is how us-centric-masculine coded it is. Navy Seals, Soldiers, broken windows policing. None of these need to be in a book about computers and yet they are all in the first (short) chapter. It makes me realise how far we’ve come in that now I notice these things, I notice that they don’t resonate, and then the conclusion is not that I am not the right fit for software engineering, because, to labour the point, METAPHORS ABOUT THE ARMY DO NOT HAVE TO BE EMPLOYED TO EXPLAIN HOW TO BUILD, DELIVER, OR MAINTAIN SOFTWARE. It’s kind of a bummer that, when this book was updated for the 20th anniversary they didn’t take the opportunity to assess the efficacy of all the refs from the US military industrial complex.
- It’s been rough emotionally having to update my worldview from “son has epilepsy which is managed by drugs” to “son has epilepsy for which the drugs sometimes work”. Not as rough as “son has epilepsy”, and emotional bombshell that I took six weeks off work to process, but still, rough. My mouth is full of ulcers again.
- The consultant wrote C’s notes directly onto the resus bed in what looked like biro. A&E have now started letting both parents in again which is really a dream come true. Overnight C and Lachie were on a children’s ward with a 16 year old who had to have 24 hour supervision from a nurse.