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I recently finished reading Managing Humans by Michael Lopp, which is a collection of the best articles from his blog on, among other things, management techniques. I bought the book on the recommendation from one of Mike Stall blog posts, and must say that I think it’s one of the better software engineering related books that I’ve ever read. On top of that it’s pretty humorous in places, which is a rarity among books in this genre.

Personally, I think that as a programmer it’s almost inevitable that after enough time in the industry you’ll end managing other programmers, and before that day comes, if it ever comes, I thought it might be interesting to see what’s involved and, maybe, at the same time learn something to improve my day job, both in terms of process and the interactions that I have with *my* manager.

The chapter on the zone, which is also on his blog, is probably my favourite of all the chapters in the book because it was the one I felt that I could relate to most. Productivity is something that I think we all individually have a hard time with, not just during work hours but also in our personal time. There’s no easy solution to improving personal productivity but there are plenty of techniques, many of which he discusses, but also ones we have developed ourselves. I’ve already started working on a post discussing my own, which I hope to publish in the very near future.

So yeah, buy this book. It’s awesome.