Book review: Getting Real by 37signals

The product manager at Traceworks and my boss, Morten Wulff, sent me the eBook Getting Real by 37signals on e-mail last friday. I was a little reluctant to read it, because it was written by the guys from 37signals. They have become much hyped amongst the designers at my workplace and the name 37signals is almost a buzz word like web 2.0 and AJAX. It’s not unusual to hear one of the designers use a sentence like “I like that lamp on your desk, it’s very web 2.0”. That’s just wrong :-)

Well, I just finished the book and boy, oh boy, it was really good. I’m sorry I doubted the brilliant guys from 37signals. The book explains to people riding the buzz word hype, why we as developers do why we do certain things. Hopefully, it will have a positive impact on the general understanding of how developers think. That is not what the whole book is about, but it was the theme that it left me with.

There were very few things I didn’t agree with the book about. For instance, I don’t believe that meetings are toxic. I think it's about discipline. A really recommend it for anyone in the sphere of the development of software. From the marketing department, project managers, designers, developers and so on and so forth.

As a developer I have always used the rule of saying no as default when someone asks me if it is possible to add some new feature to our product. The book explains why it is important to do so. I like when someone agrees with me or maybe I agree with the authors, I don’t know.

Conclusion: Read it, it’s good.