Coding is for HUMANS: An Infodoodle™ Project for Team Geek

Our friends Brian Fitzpatrick and Ben Collins-Sussman over at Google (maybe you’ve heard of it?) reached out to us to create the infodoodles for their book, Team Geek: A Software Developer’s Guide to Working Well with Others. In Team Geek, Brian and Ben recognize that such complex codes are being written these days that it just isn’t feasible to work alone as a programmer anymore. Working in a team can pose all sorts of new and interesting issues for anyone, and their book serves as a survival guide to help you (even if you aren’t a software developer) navigate the process. We had a TON of fun working on these (to get a sense of how much fun these guys are, click this link to see a comedy sketch on the Data Liberation Front), and are very proud to announce that Team Geek was recently listed #1 in Software Development AND Software Engineering books on Amazon! You can see larger versions and more of our illustrations here.

The basic idea of this book is simple: writing software is a team sport, and so human factors have as much influence on the outcome as technical factors. Even if you’ve spent years learning the technical side of programming, most people haven’t really focused on the human component, and learning to collaborate well is just as important to success. Don’t shy away from that – embrace it and put it in your bag of skills. The return on investment is huge.