Bored. So bored.

My aunt walks in with a magazine she thinks I might like.

I read Radio-Electronics for years. From grade school, through junior high, and into high school. I kept every copy. I would read and re-read. Trying to understand what I didn’t already. Dreaming about having the tools and parts to build the kinds of projects that I would read about. Very often I’d dream up my own projects, and sometimes cobble them together with the parts I could lay my hands on. Electronics absorbed me. I spent most of my teenage years split between reading science fiction and scheming to build circuits that reached toward making that fiction into fact.

Fast forward to my late teens. College wasn’t in the cards for me right away, despite all of the college prep. Somehow I’d managed to move out on my own into a little apartment I could barely afford on my electronics-assembler wages. It was a miserable existence in many ways, but my one great pleasure was Tower Books, my local bookstore. I would spend hours browsing their cramped stacks. I stayed mostly in the areas I understood – physics and electronics. (There was this baffling section on software, but it wasn’t accessible. Every book seemed to be about things that were totally made up!)

Electronics books always got me excited. With a few exceptions (another build-your-own-robot book?), I was stoked whenever something new would come in. I would linger in the bookstore for as long as I would have spent at the movies, but usually spent less. I often left empty handed, or maybe with a copy of Circuit Cellar magazine. In any case, a cheap evening of entertainment.

One day I saw a book by a familiar author I remembered from Radio-Electronics, Robert Grossblatt. I can’t remember which of his two books I bought first. It doesn’t really matter. There’s a common theme between them. These books are ostensibly about engineering electronics, but are applicable to engineering in general. Because of that, if you can read between the lines, they are some of the best foundation-building books on software development you’ll read.

I’m not sure I can properly articulate the value of these books to me. At that time especially I was broke and couldn’t afford to build the projects described. I read them anyway, preparing my mind for what I didn’t know was coming next: A career as a software developer. Those books gave me a perspective that helped me through struggles and to value and appreciate the field I was entering.

So whatever happened to Bob? I don’t know. I’ve googled a bit and haven’t found anything.

Wherever you are now Bob, thanks.

I’ll close with just a few of Bob’s “Laws of Life & Design”.

These excerpts are from “Bob Grossblatt’s Guide To Creative Circuit Design” and “The 8088 Project Book”, both © Robert Grossblatt, published by TAB Books. (A lot of TAB books were crap but they did publish a few gems and these were two of them.)

So there I was, riding the crest of the bubble, with dreams of startups dancing in my head, when a private list of angel investors fell into my lap. What did I do?

I didn’t have a lot of ethical options. The biggest quasi-ethical play I could have made would have been to cold-call these people and solicit them for investments. Investments in what, I didn’t know. I had nothing concrete to invest in. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do and had no partners. In short, I had nothing to offer and was months if not years away from even thinking about funding of any kind.

There are other people in this world who can just fire up the bullshit machine and start spewing until dollars start flowing. They work out the details later. I get the sense that many dotcoms were started that way, in fact. For better or worse, that just isn’t my style. Even if that was my style, that list wasn’t mine to use. What felt very exhilarating at first just seemed depressing after a few moments of thought. Yes, I had found a valuable hidden gem, but it wasn’t mine to keep.

So what did I do? I did exactly what @AdamD said in his comment on my previous post: I sent the author an email telling him about the problem. I explained how I found it and what he should do to fix it. I almost didn’t send that email though… I was worried that the author might claim that I had hacked his site or trespassed in some way. That isn’t as far fetched as you might think: I hear that eBay will claim a form of trespass if you scrape their website for data instead of using their API. And while legal matters are pretty murky on the Internet today, they were far murkier 9 years ago. So I waited for a response, unsure of what – if anything – would come back.

A few days later I got a reply from the author, who was happy I told him about the problem, but he wasn’t nearly as worried about it as I thought he might be. After all, having an angel list isn’t nearly as valuable as having actual relationships with those angels.

As a thank-you he sent me a t-shirt from his company which I wore often while playing hockey for many years after that.

That was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. I spent a month playing roller hockey and shooting hoops in the breezy Northern California fall. When I wasn’t doing that I was plotting my next move, which I thought might be a startup.

During one of my frequent visits to the bookstore I found a book by a well known Silicon Valley marketing guru slash venture capitalist. This was one of those business books that is light on details but somehow manages to inspire and stimulate through anecdote and analogy. I enjoyed it quite a bit and read it quickly.

At the end of each chapter the book had exercises for the reader. One of the exercises was to do research on people by using the internet. The author suggested starting off by researching him. So that’s exactly what I did.

After a few minutes of “googling my yahoo” I discovered an oddball, partially completed area of the author’s website. The full url was kind of strange, as if the page was buried in an app, but the page I was seeing clearly wasn’t part of an app. If you build web apps long enough this kind of goofiness starts to catch your eye. Feeling a little nosy, I altered the url a bit to try to figure out what kind of app was supposed to be there. That’s when I found an ugly little page with only a few links. This was clearly not part of the main site. It looked to be part of an oddball personal organizer app which had been shoehorned into the website. The kind of thing that you don’t expect to see because you’re not supposed to see it without a password. Except there was no password! This was wide open to the world, but only if you knew exactly where to look. I am not a hacker. I just played with the URL a bit. (Also: I’m not a player. I just crush a lot.)

One of the links on this page said “Angels list”.

I believe “HOLY SHIT!” was the precise phrase that came out of my mouth. You know I clicked that link, right? And sure enough, there was a big old list of names and phone numbers. I had stumbled onto the Rolodex of a well-connected VC during the Bubble. That does not happen every day.

So what did I do? Well, I’ll tell you in my next post. In the meantime, let me ask you: What would you have done?

Here is a short list of books that led me to a breakthrough in one way or another in my understanding of programming.

I’ve read a lot of other good books on programming – many of them more technical than what I list here, and some eye-opening in their own right. The books on this list were different though. These books were beyond educational; they provided some transcendental insight or stimulated a leap in my thinking. They are listed in no particular order, with an exception at the very end of this post.

• Refactoring
• Extreme Programming Explained
• The Pragmatic Programmer
• Code Complete
• Programming Pearls
• Software Tools
• Programming Perl

Finally, the most valuable “book” on programming I ever read is actually only 1 page long. It is Brian Kernighan’s Programming Style Tips. I found this early in my career and put a copy up on my office wall. More than any other text or person, this simple list shaped me as a programmer. Proof that in a wired world you don’t always have to know your mentors personally to benefit from their knowledge and generosity.

You’re a smart guy, but I can tell you’re missing out on some of the things that have been going on in the programming world lately. Even though you’re now working up the management ranks I know you are keeping your hands in the code.

Here are some things that might be of interest to you. I know they have shaped the way I program over the past few years. At the very least they might shape the way you interview and hire new minions.

Joel is where I first heard of the map/reduce “pattern”. (I’m really starting to hate that word.)

Map I had seen in Perl before, but I didn’t entirely see the point. Joel’s post made me run out and revisit map and learn about map/reduce:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/ThePerilsofJavaSchools.html

I have really enjoyed several of the papers from Google. You’d probably get a lot of mileage out of some of them, because they do a lot of data processing just like you guys do at your company. Here are a few to get you started. I recommend you check out more of them.

http://labs.google.com/papers/mapreduce.html

http://labs.google.com/papers/bigtable.html

The last thing I’ll share is Erlang. There’s a book. You should buy it and spend a couple of weekends with Erlang. Why Erlang? Is it the greatest language ever? No! Absolutely not. In some ways it is terrible. But it’s completely different from everything else you work with, and it packs a lot of great concepts in that are hard to appreciate in other FP languages that have less syntax (such as Lisp). For example, pattern matching (I’m not talking regex pattern matching, I’m talking parameter pattern matching, ala Prolog), list comprehensions, and programming without side effects were all things that bent my brain, and for the better, I think.

http://www.erlang.org/

Looking at Scheme (a lightweight Lisp dialect) might also do you some good, but I’m not sure how well you’d take to it. I think Scheme makes a better teaching language, but I think you’ll like Erlang better. There’s a book called The Little Schemer that is a popular intro to that language. I had some Scheme exposure before looking at Erlang, so that experience might have made Erlang more understandable. But then again maybe not.

Obviously you’re not going to run out and declare that your department is switching all coding over to FP. Not hardly. But just about everything I’ve learned about in FP I’ve been able to apply in C#. And it’s getting better, because C# is converging on FP. It’s not quite Ruby or Python (or Haskell) yet, but it’s getting closer.

Let me know what you think. Unless you think something bad about me, in which case shut the hell up.

Your friend,

Matt