2007 recommendations: Games

And to wrap up this recommendations series, a brief list of games I loved this year:

Boardgames:

• BattleLore, by Richard Borg: A fantastic 2-player medium-strategy game, and probably the best boardgame I’ve found. Flexible, deep, and with gorgeous components.
• Thebes, by Peter Prinz: Archaeological digging in Indiana Jones’ times. It’s got some really interesting game mechanics packed up in an elegant, smooth, and relatively quick game.
• Antiquity, by Jeroen Doumen and Joris Wiersinga: A hard and unforgiving civilization-building game. You’re more likely to lose choked by your own pollution and lack of planning than by the actions of your opponents. Quite a workout.
• Werewolf, by Dimitry Davidoff: My current favourite party game. The werewolves slaughter villagers at night; the villagers try to discover (and lynch!) the werewolves during the day. Deduction, bluffing, and face reading. Scales well to more than 20 people too!

And although I’m not much of a videogamer anymore, three excellent games for the XBOX 360 that I found are:

• Dead Rising: If you’ve always wanted to be one of a few human survivors trapped in a mall overrun with zombies (and who hasn’t?) this is the perfect game for you. I’ve spent hours just snapping pictures and trying out outfits in the (obviously unattended) stores.
• Table Tennis: It’s Pong for the 360, and 360 times more difficult.
• Bioshock: Gripping exploration of a crumbling attempt at an Ayn Rand utopia, strangely full of moral dilemmas.

And that’s it for the year. Happy 2008!

2007 recommendations: Books

Here’s a short list of some of the great books I discovered this year. Fiction:

• The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. LeGuin: Both are honest, bold, exciting, and soothing. And they’re science fiction too.
• The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, by Michael Chabon: High adventure around the comic books industry (?!). Everything that Chabon has ever written is now in my reading list.
• Black Swan Green, by David Mitchell: Here Mitchell doesn’t rely on the epic strokes and technical fireworks of Cloud Atlas, but in small-town teenage introspection. Doesn’t matter –the result is just as powerful.
• Never Let Me Go and The Remains of the Day, by Kazuo Ishiguro: Brilliant explorations of the character, hopes, and disappointments of the people that society often chooses to ignore.

Non-fiction:

• Heat, by George Monbiot: Neatly presents the huge problem of global warming, and shows how a 90% greenhouse gas reduction is technically possible through national and international policies.
• Beautiful Code, edited by Andy Oram and Greg Wilson: A great recent push towards bringing a sense of craftsman pride to software development. Every programmer has written, or stumbled upon, beautiful code –in this book, some of the most talented describe their findings. (Disclosure: Greg Wilson, one of the editors, is a colleague and friend of mine.)
• Origami Design Secrets, by Robert Lang: I haven’t gone through it all yet, but this is probably the most accessible and insightful guide to learn the theory behind origami (yes there is one).
• How Buildings Learn, by Stewart Brand: The first shock this book gives is how much buildings change over time. The second shock is how much those changes can be attributed to the functional needs of its inhabitants. It’s been said many times, but there are lessons here not just for architects, but for designers of all kinds.

What D&D character are you?

Off-topic nerd attack!

I Am A: Neutral Good Human Bard (5th Level)

Ability Scores:

Strength-13

Dexterity-15

Constitution-13

Intelligence-17

Wisdom-16

Charisma-16

Alignment:
Neutral Good A neutral good character does the best that a good person can do. He is devoted to helping others. He works with kings and magistrates but does not feel beholden to them. Neutral good is the best alignment you can be because it means doing what is good without bias for or against order. However, neutral good can be a dangerous alignment because it advances mediocrity by limiting the actions of the truly capable.

Race:
Humans are the most adaptable of the common races. Short generations and a penchant for migration and conquest have made them physically diverse as well. Humans are often unorthodox in their dress, sporting unusual hairstyles, fanciful clothes, tattoos, and the like.

Class:
Bards often serve as negotiators, messengers, scouts, and spies. They love to accompany heroes (and villains) to witness heroic (or villainous) deeds firsthand, since a bard who can tell a story from personal experience earns renown among his fellows. A bard casts arcane spells without any advance preparation, much like a sorcerer. Bards also share some specialized skills with rogues, and their knowledge of item lore is nearly unmatched. A high Charisma score allows a bard to cast high-level spells.

—

The test is a bit annoying but I actually almost always chose Bard as my character class, so it’s probably not terrible. Too bad bards always sucked…

What Dungeons and Dragons character are you?

2007 recommendations: Podcasts

First, two great public radio shows that I discovered this year, thanks to my colleague Jon Pipitone:

• This American Life: Initially the title was a bit of a put-down, but this show is absolutely fantastic. Emotional without being cheap; intelligent but accessible. No other radio show has made me cry and laugh out loud through my daily walk to my office.
• RadioLab: Every episode is an introductory exploration of a subject –say, sleep– from different scientific (and often historic or artistic) points of view. Entertaining and instructive.

For news and news-like podcasts, these are all quite good:

• New York Times Video: An eclectic, high-quality mix of news reports, movie reviews, and even cooking recipes that I can actually follow.
• New Yorker Out Loud: There’s an episode accompanying every issue of the New Yorker magazine, with an interview exploring one of its features in more detail.
• IT Conversations: Sometimes these conversations drag a bit too long, but they should still be quite interesting for anyone in the field.
• The Onion Radio News and Video News: Alright, so these aren’t real news, but they’re really funny, and usually different from their “print” content.

And finally, two more podcasts covering some of my favourite pastimes:

• New York Times Book Review: Great interviews and insightful discussions on new book releases.
• On Board Games: Perhaps surprisingly, there are plenty of boardgaming podcasts. This is the best I’ve found –decent editing, good discussions, timely reviews.

All of the podcasts I’ve listed are free, and available through iTunes.

Now, if you have some recommendations for me, please let me know! I’m listening to these more quickly than they make them.

Personal experience vs. Science

Greg Wilson has an interesting post regarding both the lack of evidence and the lack of regard for evidence that is prevalent in software engineering.

He mentions a commenter that says “As a working programmer I favour my own personal experiences and experimentation over academic studies…”. This widespread (though not universal) opinion makes software development one of the few modern professional fields where practitioners still largely shun scientific evidence.

To their credit, it’s also still hard to find relevant, trustworthy, replicated empirical research in our field. Greg points towards Glass’s excellent Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering and to the Empirical Software Engineering Journal (semi-restricted access). Steve McConnell plays an excellent role at this as well. But we need many more bridges connecting industry and academia, for the benefit of both communities. Scientific software engineering blogs, anyone?

Democamp Toronto 16

We had Democamp 16 last night at the Toronto Board of Trade, and it was one of the best I’ve been to — thanks to David Crow, Jay Goldman, Joey deVilla, Leila Boujnane, and Greg Wilson for pulling it off again. Great demos by Igor Foox (on UTest, an application to help students get into the habit of test-driven development) and Ryan Schmidt (with ShapeShop, a crowd pleasing demo of sketch-like 3D modeling), both from the University of Toronto.

As for the Ignite presentations (20 slides, 15 seconds each on an automatic timer), I liked all three –especially Mark Kuznicki’s on creativity and collaboration–, but I’m not convinced about the format. It tends to turn presentations into something like music videos, or like movies cut by a caffeinated editor: it’s all about the visual impact, and the ideas can’t really lodge in the mind. As an alternative, I think 5 slides of 1 minute each, for instance, forces just as much discipline, and puts far more emphasis on the core ideas than the current format.

Or maybe I’m just slow.

Democamp has changed a lot with the years. Yesterday’s incarnation was in a relatively fancy venue, offered free food, gave some 10-15 minutes of “commercials” to the (generous!) sponsors, and included a business card raffle. More like a concert and less like a jazz night. It probably has to do with the size –Democamps now draw at least a couple of hundred people per night–, and by all means it’s an indication of its great success and of the strength of the Toronto start-up community, but perhaps to find that jazz night feel I will need to frequent the smaller barcamp niches that have started to form around this.