I first learned about Gojko Adzic, who is the author of the book I’m soon going to review, when a friend told me about this presentation on YouTube ”GOTO 2014 – Adaptive Planning Beyond User Stories”. He is also the author behind other books, like ”Impact Mapping: Making a Big Impact with Software Products and Projects” & ”Fifty Quick Ideas to Improve Your User Stories”.
I let Gojko himself introduce you to this book, ”Humans vs Computers”:
”As a professional software developer, I’m much more guilty than the average person of driving civilisation towards a digital apocalypse. At the same time, I’ve been on the wrong end of a computer bug frequently enough to appreciate the pain that such a thing can create. This book is my attempt to raise awareness about some common and dangerous, but perfectly preventable, types of software blunders. I also want to help ordinary people fight back against digital monsters.”
Content
As you now may imagine, this book is full of anecdotes about software working bad 🙂 The stories are divided into the following sections:
- Artificial but not intelligence
- The surprising facts about our world
- Algorithms as fast as food
- Wild wild tech
- The inverse monkey rule
As an example I can tell you about the first story presented in the book, called ”Licence to void”. This is about Robert Barbour from Los Angeles that wanted a new licence plate for his car. Barbour was fond of sailing and selected as his top two choices BOATING and SAILING. But the form he was using had three mandatory fields, so he had to give one more, and wrote ”NO PLATE”. A few months later a computer at the Department of Motor Vehicles interpreted literally something that humans would easily understand as a missing piece of data. Barbour’s first two choices were already taken, so the licence plate was issued for his third choice.
A plate saying ”NO PLATE” sounded quirky enough so Barbour kept it. The problems started a month later, when he started receiving notices for parking fines from all over California. When a illegally parked vehicle did not have a licence plate, the officers still had to to issue a ticket and the computer system needed a plate, so they wrote ”NO PLATE” 🙂
Recommendation
If you are in the software business this is a fun book to read. The last section ”The inverse monkey rule” also gives you advice on how to avoid the errors described in the book.
All the best,
Tomas from TheAgileist
The Agileist 