Show Your Work!
In his New York Timesbestseller Steal Like an Artist, Austin Kleon showed readers how to unlock their creativity by "stealing" from the community of other movers and shakers. Now, in an even more forward-thinking and necessary book, he shows how to take that critical next step on a creative journey--getting known. Show Your Work!is about why generosity trumps genius. It's about getting findable, about using the network instead of wasting time "networking." It's not self-promotion, it's self-discovery--let others into your process, then let them steal from you. Filled with illustrations, quotes, stories, and examples, Show Your Work!offers ten transformative rules for being open, generous, brave, productive. In chapters such asYou Don't Have to Be a Genius; Share Something Small Every Day; and Stick Around, Kleon creates a user's manual for embracing the communal nature of creativity-- what he calls the "ecology of talent." From broader life lessons about work (you can't find your voice if you don't use it) to the etiquette of sharing--and the dangers of oversharing--to the practicalities of Internet life (build a good domain name; give credit when credit is due), it's an inspiring manifesto for succeeding as any kind of artist or entrepreneur in the digital age.
Stats for nerds
4recommend
9mentions
7people
2015–2025years
44% recommend56% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Austin Kleon wrote a great book "Show Your Work!" discussing this approach of sharing, communicating and exchanging creative ideas. He frames the problem in a similar fashion and brings all kinds of nuanced aspects of the issue into the discussion.
- Show Your Work! by Austin Kleon
It's a short book with a bias toward action that's changed how I interact with my work and share it with others.
Key takeaways:
- good work doesn't market or promote itself [writing a great library doesn't matter if you don't have docs and examples to make it accessible to people]
- give people a convenient way to access your work [convince yourself that having a personal mailing list does not make you too self-important]
- share your side projects to create a feedback loop early [maybe they could help solve other people's problems too] / stop telling yourself "i'll ship this after i fix one more thing"
- let good ideas bubble up from "flow" to "stock" -- for example, a few well received tweets might lead to a blog post which might lead to a whole book
- reuse the things you create across projects and mediums
- life is messy and uncertain, but you choose how you crop and present your experiences [share the interesting parts!]
My full chapter-by-chapter notes: https://github.com/tedmiston/notes/blob/master/books/Show%20...
- I finished "Thinking Fast and Slow" by Kahneman - A slow read, but a good one. He talks about the intricacies and surprising observations about how me take decisions.
"Logicomix" - A brief "history" of logic, its not always historically accurate. Did I tell you its a graphic novel?
"Show Your work" - Aston Kleon - A short motivating read about sharing ones work, he makes some good arguments for sharing the process as well, not just the product.
Picked up "Coders at work" - read two chapters, a great read so far (I know its pretty popular one amoung HN)
- Awesome. I've been inspired by Austin Kleon's Show Your Work! to find more ways to share our creative output and process with a wider community
- Cal Newport, So Good They Can't Ignore You. This book convinced me to stop widening my skillset by beginning again, and start doubling down on my strengths.
Gene Kim et al., The Phoenix Project. This book reinvigorated my love for management, which I lost in 2021–2022. I'm still an IC, but I decided to stop refusing management roles.
Kent Beck, Extreme Programming Explained, 2nd Edition. This book lit a fire under my ass to figure out better ways of working. I followed it up with the next one in a book club at work.
James Shore et al., The Art of Agile Software Development, 2nd Edition. This book gave me hope that a productive, humanist, productivity-oriented workflow can work in today's software world. I read it with my teammates in a book club at work, including the software engineers, QA tester, product owners, and UX designer. Unfortunately the rest of my team had little interest in putting it into place where I work.
Robert C. Martin,
Clean Architecture. This book was a delightful read. Uncle Bob weaved practical advice together with stories from his past that served both to illustrate his points and to entertain. While I don't agree with every word in the book (e.g. Screaming Architecture), I still recommend it to every Senior+ Software Engineer.Eric Evans,
Domain-Driven Design: Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software. Aside from its amazing content, this book has some of the best typesetting I've ever seen. I sought out a font that is a match (or near-match) and reverse-engineered the letter spacing, line height, heading font sizes, etc. Its content was great too, but I was glad to have read Vaughn Vernon's DDDD first.Vaughn Vernon,
Domain-Driven Design Distilled. This book followed up Shore's work in our book club at work. Everybody on the team really liked what they read, but nobody felt like they had actionable insights. So the engineers went on to read Vernon's IDDD, and the non-engineers read Adzic's IM and Patton's USM.Vaughn Vernon,
Implementing Domain-Driven Design. I read this book with a book club at work. While Evans's work was well-grounded in theory and left a lot of interpretation in the patterns behind DDD, Vernon is a practical, nuts-and-bolts DIY guide to one approach to DDD. Luckily, these tactics resonated with my team and our codebase has seen marked improvements in the past few months. I'm looking forward to our process catching up so we can do more than "DDD Lite."Jeff Patton,
User Story Mapping. This book was fun, practical, and completely outside any way I'd ever worked. It also helped me understand exactly why I've failed every time I tried to make my own SaaS startup on nights and weekends.Gojko Adzic,
Impact Mapping. This book was basically a pamphlet. The process seems...good? But since I'm no longer in a role with the influence or authority to recommend product direction, I doubt I'll get much use out of this for a while.Tanya Reilly,
The Staff Engineer's Path. This book wants to follow in the footsteps of Camille Fournier's The Manager's Path, but it seemed less specific and useful as a roadmap. Perhaps that's because of how different "Staff Engineer" is from company to company, at least when compared to the roles covered by Fournier. But it did help me earn my promotion to* Staff Engineer, so it was clearly worth reading.Tamar Rosier, Your Brain's Not Broken. This book was the second I read after I got diagnosed with adult ADHD. I appreciated that it helped me de-stigmatize, because I harbored some bummer feelings when I realized no actually I didn't grow out of it. It also helped me reflect on my habits of action, and see them in a new light. I was surprised to see how much of my anger and frustration in life was a coping mechanism to help me get things done. I've had a much calmer life since recognizing that.
Alexander Tarlinder, Developer Testing. I'm not quite finished with this book, but I'll be done by the end of the year. It's been a great overview of automated testing from the perspective of a programmer. It helped refresh my memory on things I knew but forgot. It filled gaps that I had in my baseline knowledge. It corrected things I "knew" but was slightly incorrect about. I now recommend this to any programmer, whether or not they've got a habit of testing.
Austin Kleon's trilogy: Steal Like An Artist, Show Your Work, Keep Going. These books were cute, full of incredibly quotable passages, and fun to read. I didn't spend enough time on them, though. A lot of the lessons I thought I'd learned left my brain like water through a sieve.
Kent Beck, Tidy First?. This book helped me understand the economics of software through a new light. That was important to me, because during the time I spent as a Director of Software Engineering I was not given a budget and asked to manage the department's expenses.
Antonio Cangiano, Technical Blogging, 2nd Edition. This book convinced me to start a blog. It was going really well, and then I shrank back from it due to fear of vulnerability. Since I got over those fears and started blogging again, it's been a lot of fun again. I incorporated what would've been tweets into the blog (as "quick posts") in addition to my longer-form, less-ephemeral content (as "articles"). Writing has been a great way to solidify what I've learned and distill my opinions. Heck, I should migrate this comment to my blog.
I also read other books (especially on my journey to becoming a magician), but these were the ones I thought Hacker News might be most interested in.
- Fiction
I discovered and read Blake Crouch this year
- Dark Matter
- Recursion
- Upgrade
- Pines
I also discovered and read
- Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
- Gravity by Tess Gerritsen
- A Man by, At the End of the Matinee Keiichiro Hirano
It's between Recursion and Project Hail Mary for me. I am leaning more towards Recursion.
Non-fiction
I discovered and read the following this year
- Deep Work by Cal Newport
- The Millionaire Fastlane by M.J. DeMarco
- Zero to One by Peter Thiel
- How to Start a Business Without any Money by Rachel Bridge
- Creative Gene by Hideo Kojima
- Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson
- The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel
- Show Your Work, Steal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon
- Press Reset by Jason Schreier
I would say Deep Work and Steve Jobs had the biggest impact on me.
Programming
I am learning Elixir using Elixir In Action by Sasa Juric.
