Wes Baker

The material was relatively good, though it felt like a lot of super-positive self-help. If you do decide to read this, do yourself a favor and avoid the audiobook like the plague. The narrator is slow in parts and fast in others and generally feels like a novice instead of a professional.

Great book for getting the gist of agile and convincing you to use better development processes. But overall your time would be better spent actually using an agile method and reading about good development processes from a book like The Pragmatic Programmer.

Well worth reading if what you do requires any sort of creativity. It's more of a kick-in-the-pants kind of book more than anything, but Mr. Pressfield does offer suggestions on how to do this kind of work, mostly in the form of avoiding Resistance, otherwise known as (writers') “block”. If you're waffling back and forth about whether or not to read this book, you might as well, it's incredibly quick—3 hours by my watch.

This was an incredibly fast read, maybe 30 minutes or so long. It's full of beautiful imagery, simple dialog, and surprises aplenty. Being something written for young adults, there's a lot of archetypes to be found: the chosen one, unknown and dangerous magics, and the deceased parent, however they all tie together very neatly and the story makes you care despite the genre-standard tropes.

If I had to pick one thing that this book does incredibly well, it's the action panels and how they create a fantastic sense of motion.

I've only read it once so far, but I found myself rereading chapters regularly because 1) the main point of the chapter wasn't neatly condensed into a one-liner (which is neither good nor bad) and 2) the chapters moved so quickly that I felt like I missed something. There's a lot of good ideas in here, but whether you can actually make them happen at your company is a whole other matter. I feel like the advice in this book has several audiences and your use of this book largely depends on whether you're an employee, a manager, or an entrepreneur.

An entrepreneur would get the most out of this book, though they have to be willing to hear its advice and try it—it certainly goes against typical practices.

An employee will long for some of the ideas, but will only have so much power to make them happen. Some of the employee-applicable content will feel like common sense, but some of it runs counter to prevailing ideas, in particular the idea of not being constantly available.

A manager is somewhere in between the entrepreneur and the employee depending on their ability to change current practices, but they can be the champions for sane deadlines, trimming down scope, and protecting their employees' time. They can also be a good example for their team(s).

Overall, I enjoyed the book, but I feel like I need to read it again, or at least read over my highlights, in order to get everything out of it. The short chapters lead to the idea moving quickly through my head and I want to better hold some of those ideas because they're worth holding onto.