The This-Is-Not-a-Juxtaposition Book Post

[roadrunnertwice]

Evan Dahm – Rice Boy

May 19

I’ve been meaning to read this for a long time, and finally bought the paperback at Stumptown.

The hype was right, it’s really good! Not so much for plot, which is fairly standard, or for dialogue, which does its job fine. But the strange, sad atmosphere was wonderful to sink into, and the world was alien and beautiful and nightmarish, and the characters stick with you. Or with me, at least.

The art and cartooning are simple on the surface, but their understructure is really sound. This is a good comic, not just a good story.

Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford – The Phoenix Project

Mar/Apr ???

So, this was work-related. Actually it was kind of an Event in the industry; Gene Kim did the Visible Ops Handbook, so the new book was a moderately big deal. Consequently, there were a bunch of copies floating around the office, and I figured I could use some more sysadmin anthropology under my belt so I borrowed one of ‘em. Also, my brain was fried and I could absolutely not handle whatever I was ostensibly reading around this time (probably that 50-pages-of-personally-fraught-letters-set-in-all-italics part of Possession), but I figured I could manage something lightweight and didactic.

I’ll cut to what is probably the chase for most of my friends reading here: there’s no good reason to read this if you’re not in the IT industry in some capacity. It’s exactly what it looks like, which is a polemical/instructional text wrapped in the barest gauzy trappings of the novel. (In a fairly silly way — there’s a villain, a Mysterious Protector, etc.) The prose is Pretty Bad, and likewise the character writing.

That said!

ONE: You might be in the IT industry (or adjacent to it) and be in denial about it. This is actually fairly common, I think; it certainly afflicted a large chunk of [old job]. And one of the running themes of the book is that IT ops isn’t something that can easily be walled off within an organization; it tends to touch everything and leak.

TWO: As someone who makes their living by arranging information and trying to teach shit to strangers, I respect an effective polemic. It’s a valuable craft that gets things done. Even the silliness of the villain conflict ends up being an effective argument (to wit: workplace narcissists are too good at turning the environment against you to be fought on their own turf, but knowledge, perspective, and solid data about your work can protect you).

THREE: I did in fact learn a thing or two. Also, “something lightweight” may not be a universal description of the book; I was talking with Tom from work about it at one point and he said that he and all of his fellow ex-sysadmins who’d read it had experienced some mild-to-moderate post-traumatic symptoms around the middle of the book.

Anyway, the upshot is that judging it as a novel is kind of missing the point; instead, it’s quite a well-constructed argument about the shape and nature of IT work and the importance of making said work and its costs knowable inside and outside the department, along with some very sensible general principles and approaches for getting un-screwed. So read it if that sounds useful, and if not don’t.