The Morning Paper

Most of folks working for large IT organizations have this interesting goal “# of White Papers published in a quarter”. Mid-managers always talk about need of establishing culture of “Thought Leadership”, and stress on importance of writing white papers. Despite so much emphasis, the results are quite bleak.

My analysis of the situation is that most of us don’t care about reading good white papers and hence fails to understand what a good quality white papers is and what can be really articulated from our day to day learning.

Now best advice for writing good clean code is read lots (tons) of good clean code in the first place, same applies for white papers.

Advice for managers — ensure that your team has lots of good code to read.

the morning paper blog from Adrian Colyer is an excellent resource for summary of interesting/influential/important papers from the world of CS. He provides excellent summary of various white papers across variety of topics from compute science.

Now a word (or lines) of caution

1. Some of the white papers (and even their summary from Adrian) are really tough to read unless you have required background

2. You don’t need to read each and every post and its related white paper, don’t get intimated by amount of information.

3. If you don’t understand a white paper or find it difficult to grasp, don’t worry, just read it for now, and may be 6 months down the line you will start grasping the concepts.

You can start with following

1. On designing and deploying internet-scale services

2. On the criteria to be used in decomposing systems into modules

Happy Reading