Bookshelf
One of the best compliments I've ever gotten was being called a "curious nerd."
It's true: I love to learn, and I read voraciously in order to inform my research practice, deepen my understanding on the latest thinking around Developer Experience, and ensure the programs and learning experiences I develop follow best practices in curriculum development and instructional design.​
Below, you'll find a collection of books, research papers, and other texts that have heavily influenced my thinking, processes, and practices.
Research Methods
Kathleen Gerson & Sarah Damaske
From the publisher: "Qualitative interviewing is among the most widely used methods in the social sciences, but it is arguably the least understood. In The Science and Art of Interviewing, Kathleen Gerson and Sarah Damaske offer clear, theoretically informed and empirically rich strategies for conducting interview studies. They present both a rationale and guide to the science-and art-of in-depth interviewing to take readers through all the steps in the research process, from the initial stage of formulating a question to the final one of presenting the results..."
Mario Luis Small & Jessica McCrory Calarco
From the publisher: "Suppose you were given two qualitative studies: one is a piece of empirically sound social science and the other, though interesting and beautifully written, is not. How would you tell the difference? Qualitative Literacy presents criteria to assess qualitative research methods such as in-depth interviewing and participant observation...This guide provides social scientists, researchers, students, evaluators, policy makers, and journalists with the tools needed to identify and evaluate quality in field research."
Ashley T. Rubin
From the publisher: "In Rocking Qualitative Social Science, Ashley Rubin provides an entertaining treatise, corrective vision, and rigorously informative guidebook for qualitative research methods that have long been dismissed in deference to traditional scientific methods. Recognizing the steep challenges facing many, especially junior, social science scholars who struggle to adapt their research models to narrowly defined notions of "right," Rubin argues that properly nourished qualitative research can generate important, creative, and even paradigm-shifting insights. This book is designed to help people conduct good qualitative research, talk about their research, and evaluate other scholars' work..."
Developer Science
Fabian Fagerholm & Jurgen Münch
From the abstract: "This article motivates the importance of developer experience, sketches related approaches from other domains, proposes a definition of developer experience that is derived from similar concepts in other domains, describes an ongoing empirical study to better understand developer experience, and finally gives an outlook on planned future research activities."
Michaela Greiler, Margaret-Anne Storey, & Abi Noda
From the abstract: "Developer experience is an important concern for software organizations as enhancing developer experience improves productivity, satisfaction, engagement and retention. We set out to understand what affects developer experience through semi-structured interviews with 21 developers from industry, which we transcribed and iteratively coded. Our findings elucidate factors that affect developer experience and characteristics that influence their respective importance to individual developers..."
Developer Thriving: Four Sociocognitive Factors that Create Resilient Productivity on Software Teams
Catherine M. Hicks, Carol S. Lee, & Morgan Ramsay
From the abstract: "We present a research-based framework for measuring successful environments on software teams for long-term and sustainable sociocognitive problem-solving. Across 1,282 full-time developers in 12+ industries, we tested the factors of our framework and found it predictive of developers’ self-reported productivity."
Gregg A. Muragishi, Lauren Aguilar, Priyanka B. Carr, & Gregory M. Walton
From the abstract: "When people enter new work settings, we theorized that they are vulnerable to questioning whether they will be received in ways that allow them to contribute to shared goals. If so, treatment that clarifies the stance that others take toward the self, which we call microinclusions, that convey a receptivity and supportiveness to one’s contributions may bolster a sense of fit. Further, in examining this question in technology contexts, we theorized that such microinclusions may be particularly impactful for women for whom underrepresentation and negative stereotypes make opportunities to contribute especially fraught..."
Instructional Design & Curriculum Development
Susan Nelson Spencer
From the description: "This book teaches you all about the four capabilities that are most important to excelling as an instructional designer—teaching, writing, creating, and analyzing. The chapters are designed in a way that provides you with practical tips for day-to-day learning projects through true ID stories. You’ll get familiar with common misconceptions surrounding the field, along with how to overcome your shortcomings. With the help of easy-to-understand real-world case studies and practical tips, each chapter focuses on developing one particular competency to help you grasp the concepts with ease."
Jason McDonald & Richard West
From the description: "Our purpose in this book is twofold. First, we introduce the basic skill set and knowledge base used by practicing instructional designers. We do this through chapters contributed by experts in the field who have either academic, research-based backgrounds, or practical, on-the-job experience (or both). Our goal is that students in introductory instructional design courses will be able to use this book as a guide for completing a basic instructional design project. We also hope the book is useful as a ready resource for more advanced students or others seeking to develop their instructional design knowledge and skills."
Aubrey Cook
From the description: "Instructional design offers powerful ways to build training and teach new skills, but its methods run DEEP. Finding a clear, easy-to-follow path can be frazzling. Where do you even start? Whether you’re a new instructional designer, looking to transition from another job, or tasked with training for your organization, this book will help get you rolling! We’ll dig into examples and spin tips, tactics, and research-backed learning principles into a professional workflow."
Miscellany
Elaine K. Horwitz
From the abstract: "Prospective foreign language teachers enter the methods class with many preconceived ideas about how languages are leamed and how they should be taught. These beliefs can directly interfere with their understanding and receptivity to the information and techniques presented in the methods class...It is suggested that a systematic assessment of student beliefs would increase student learning and satisfaction in the foreign language methods class."
Monique S. Ross
From the abstract: "A call to the computer science education community to make our values match our actions related to broadening participation through epistemological inclusion."
Mary Jo Bona, Jane Rinehart & Rose Mary Volbrecht
From the introduction: "The three authors of this article are all experienced university teachers. We have been drawn to teaching for many reasons, perhaps the most important of which is that we share an attraction to the continual renewal and surprise that teaching offers. It is predictable or fully subject to our control; teaching can take us to places we did not expect to go. We want to share our recent journey to a new place. This article presents our reflection on the experience of creating a learning community with twenty-two students during the spring of 1993."