In Montreal this summer, while making idle conversation, Paul asked me if I had read anything interesting. Here was my answer…

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Five years ago, I met D. Richard Hipp because my friends were thinking of bundling a database he wrote into PHP. Since that time, besides being in the PHP core and thus about 40% of the web servers on the planet, SQLite is in every smartphone, in software such as Firefox, platforms such as Adobe AIR, and operating systems such as Apple Mac OS X. It is used by Oracle and Bloomberg.

I was curious how the unassuming man I met took the new-found fame of his pet software project. This is why, despite my hatred for all things database—they’re boring and talks about them are probably what it feels like to sit through a course on actuarial accounting—I popped into his talk at OSCON.

I was glad I did. It was about, of all things, checklists.

My brother and father are much more responsible than my mom and me. One things that separates them from us was in their methodical use of checklists. Watching his talk reminded me how important they are, how they can be used for so much more than I considered, and how thankful I was that I finally made a packing checklist before going to Portland (and Montreal). 🙂

Read the article, and, if that interests you, buy the book.

With a little imagination, a checklist will change your life.Continue reading my notes from the book after the jump