Three Good Books

I’ve been working on the Cafe World team at Zynga for just over a year now.  It’s a great ride – we have an energetic and talented team who have built a wonderful game.

Zynga executes software projects in highly compressed time frames (features in days or weeks rather than weeks or months), which presents its own unique scheduling challenges.  This has forced me to think hard about how to optimize software development while moving at what we affectionately call “Zynga Speed”.

As a result, I’ve been spending a lot of time recently pondering software schedules and project management issues.  This has brought me back to some of the books and ideas that influenced me over the years.

I’ll cover these in a little more detail in subsequent posts, but the following are three good sources that stuck with me long after I read them

• Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams, Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister
• The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, Frederick Brooks
• Joel On Software, Joel Spolsky

While some or all of the material in each of these books may not apply to the situation you’re in, each is a thought-provoking and worthwhile read.

(Thanks for reading – Steve Klinkner)

PS To be fair, the full name of Joel’s book is

Joel on Software: And on Diverse and Occasionally Related Matters That Will Prove of Interest to Software Developers, Designers, and Managers, and to Those Who, Whether by Good Fortune or Ill Luck, Work with Them in Some Capacity