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Cover image for Creative Selection Book: An autobiography of an individual contributor
Ben Halpern
Ben Halpern

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Creative Selection Book: An autobiography of an individual contributor

The responses to this thread were all really interesting:

While there are no consensus responses, there are a lot of "heck no!" responses in terms of being "promoted" out of coding.

This reminds me of a book I recently read called "Creative Selection", which is an autobiographical tale of an Apple software developer, and the only book like this I've read written by someone who stayed in software development longterm.

The book is pretty interesting due to how close it gets you to the story of the iPhone and other Apple creations—Ken Kocienda, the author, specifically worked on the keyboard. But to this point, part of his journey was a "promotion" into management, quickly followed by a choice to go back into pure software development, where he more-or-less stayed for the rest of his career.

It's a good read overall.

📘 View Creative Selection on Amazon

I consumed it as an audiobook, which worked well for the material.

Happy coding!

Top comments (7)

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taillogs profile image
Ryland G

Great recommendation. I’m assuming you’ve read the Jobs biography?

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

I don’t want to come off as a Steve Jobs fanboy but I’ve read it like five or six times (and it’s a long book!)

I tend to soak up interesting biographies up like water

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taillogs profile image
Ryland G

I’ve read it a few times myself. I also thought it would be fun to read every book that is mentioned or recommended inside that Steve Jobs bio. It was a fun set of books.

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dance2die profile image
Sung M. Kim • Edited

I am sold and just got a copy 😉

book

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

Let me know what you think!

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Sung M. Kim

First of all, thank you, Ben for introducing this book.
Just finished the book and it was indeed "a good read overall".

The experience shared in the eyes of a software engineer was a fresh one. I especially liked the parts where Ken was able to analyze what he did, what he did wrong, and how he worked with others.

I give it 👍👍

I hope others can have fun reading it and also get much out of Ken's experience 🙂

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Sung M. Kim

Sure thing there, Ben.
Thank you for the book recommendation 👊