Searching the year without pants

Just finished reading The Year without Pants by Scott Berkun, which is about his 2 year tenure at Automattic working for WordPress.com. Inspiring and worth a look, but not what I’m here to say.

Unusually for me, because it was borrowed from a friend, the book was in traditional paper form instead of downloaded to my Kindle. I love the convenience of the Kindle, but I do get it when people say to me, “It’s just not the same – I need the feel of the paper”. And as a slight aside, before my main point, I have found I need the location feature turned on when reading my Kindle. I am disconcerted that I don’t know how far I am through the book. With the paper version, I know instinctively because of the size of the wedges of paper either side of my thumb. Not so with an e-reader, and it turns out I like to know where I am in the story arc.

Cover of the book The Year Without PantsBut my main point is this. Time and time again I have been reminded that Kindles and e-readers win hands down over paper for one feature alone – the search function. When I decided to write my first post here, I recalled there was a great passage in “The Year without Pants” that summed up beautifully for me the obsessive nature of developers. Could I find it? Could I hell. And no matter how much I enjoyed the feel of the paper and the quality of the images, if I hadn’t borrowed the book from Dan, it would have been bounced off a wall by now.

All of which means you don’t get to read the spot-on description of developers’ obsessive nature. Unless someone has the book on their Kindle and searches “Obsessive” for me…

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