Care

Of the advice I've received and what I've read so far regarding being a good manager, most everything seems to boil down to this one verb: care. Care about the people on your team. Hell - Care about all the other people, too. And of course, more obviously, care about the work you are doing.

On the subject of being a technical manager, or just a manager in general, here are some books that I have on my reading list:

• Becoming a Technical Leader: An Organic Problem-Solving Approach by Gerald M. Weinberg

• How to Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie

• Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister

• Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager by Michael Lopp

I started my list after reading one of Jeff Atwood's blog entries at Coding Horror. If you haven't checked out his blog yet, I highly recommend it. It's the best technical blog I follow.

I want to write a technical blog.

I used to think, hey, what do I know? Not that that stops a lot of people, apparently.

After being a developer for a while, I actually do think I know a few things after all. Hopefully some of my insight will help someone else some time. If not, I believe my experience, if I write it down, can still help me at a later date.

Otherwise, I just wasted a lot of time and ended up old and alone. Maybe then, I will blog about how to do that.