Finished reading Emergence
This weekend I finished reading Emergence by Steven Johnson. It should be obvious from the number of bloggings that I find this book very interesting. In fact, I blogged about it long before I got to read it. Here are all my related posts:
- Emergence (April 18)
- Steven Johnson on blogs (May 11)
- Steven Johnson (cont’d) (May 11)
- Sticky business (May 11)
- Steven Johnson at ETech conference (May 18)
- Slime molds (August 30)
- Pandemonium (September 2)
- Programmer ants (September 2)
- Emergent software projects: genome analogy (September 3)
- Sidewalks making better cities? (September 4)
- Sidewalks making better cities? (revisited) (September 4)
- Emergent cities (September 5)
- Does the Web learn? (September 6)
- Does the Web learn? (revisited) (September 7)
- Emergent open-source (September 9)
See also my Emergence book list for a list of books from the bibliography that I think are interesting.
I’m primarily interested in applying this kind of thinking on software projects. How to do things bottom-up instead of top-down. How to let the design and architecture emerge instead of planning them. How to let the team members ‐ programmers as well as customers, as one team (Word document) – work without a designated leader.
Incidentally, I’ve found two books in progress about this. First, the Emergent Design book I’ve blogged about before (see here). Last week I realized that Roy Miller, one of the people behind the XP Applied book (see here), is working on a book about “is currently writing a book about complexity, emergence, and software development” (according to his bio in the new Demystifying XP series at IBM developerWorks). I look forward to both of these books.