Posts by Scott Barstow

  1. Elon Musk

    Simply one of the most compelling stories you'll ever read.

  2. Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life

    In many ways, I grew up with Steve Martin. I listened to A Wild and Crazy Guy as a kid. The Jerk was one of the first R-rated movies I...

  3. Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI

    I was somehow living under a rock and hadn't heard about this book. A tremendous story of avarice, corruption and abuse of power.

  4. Pineapple Street

    Light read about New York high society. We listened to this book on a 10-hour car trip and it was a perfect fit. Don't know that I would've read it...

  5. No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam

    I've done work with a large Syrian refugee community here in Raleigh and found myself wanting to know more about Islam. Excellent book on the historical context for Islam's rise...

  6. The Malmo Series

    This series is look into daily life in Sweden through the eyes of Anita Sundstrom, a police detective in Malmo. I've read all nine of the books and found them...

  7. The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry

    I read this book right after reading Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. It's completely different, and a lighter read. If you are a book lover like me, this is a...

  8. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

    A great story about partnership, gaming, entrepreneurship and love all rolled up into one. I read this book in less than two days while on a short holiday and was...

  9. The Almost Nearly Perfect People: Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia

    I have a not-so-secret love affair with all things Scandinavia. This book was a hilarious, yet incredibly insightful, read into the culture, economies and politics of the Scandinavian countries. Great...

  10. Replacing Your Head of Engineering

    I've written previously about firing your CTO in a hostile situation and how to survive your CTO leaving. In this post I'd like to talk about the process you as...

  11. Why Your Sales Team Might Be Killing Your Company

    "Every system is perfectly designed to get the result that it does." W. Edwards Deming When your product and engineering team is struggling to deliver consistently, it is tempting to...

  12. The Perfect Product and Engineering Organization

    "Any organization that designs systems will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure." Melvin Conway One of the questions I've been asked most often,...

  13. Elon Musk on Decisions and Staffing

    On Decisions I was listening to the year-end episode of the All In podcast over the weekend. Though I don't love these kinds of "recap" shows, this show was great...

  14. Creative Selection: Inside Apple’s Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

    A peek under the covers of Apple's design process as they built the iPhone keyboard

  15. The Most Common Causes of Poor Performance in a Software Product Organization

    The most common complaints in software product companies are typically some form of the below: "We're spending all of this money and I don't know what I'm getting" "Our team...

  16. Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media

    Such a great and timely book given the times we are living through. A deep exploration of the history and importance of free speech, and the constant back and forth...

  17. Taking Advantage of a Crisis

    Not too long ago, a company I know had a serious outage. The customer base was split across the old, legacy environment and the new public cloud, and there was...

  18. Events vs. Systems

    "Humans tend to read things as events rather than an outcome of a system that can be predicted." Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows When software systems are failing, we...

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