Reading and Learning: May 17, 2015
Sunday, 17 May, 2015 — learning improvement
A fair amount of reading and podcast listening since the last entry in mid-April. Since putting together a small tool to pull reading information out of Instapaper, these sorts of posts have become much easier to pull together.
My goal is to automate them further using a Rails application I’m building. The application’s aim is to reduce the friction of recording what technical/technical culture material I’ve read and podcasts I’ve listened to. More on that later.
Here’s the latest log:
Articles and books
I read the following:
I am proud to be one of the 17 founders/authors of the The Agile Manifesto back in 2001. I think it provided a jolt of energy, hope of a better way of doing things, of creating software and making the world work better. It was a pivotal turning point.
But in the 14 years since then, we‘ve lost our way. The word “agile” has become sloganized; meaningless at best, jingoist at worst. We have large swaths of people doing “flaccid agile,” a half-hearted attempt at following a few select software development practices, poorly. We have scads of vocal agile zealots—as per the definition that a zealot is one who redoubles their effort after they’ve forgotten their aim.
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- Ben Orenstein covers a key principle of OO
At Wiredrive, we do a fair amount of code reviews. I had never done one before I started here so it was a new experience for me. I think it’s a good idea to…
What object-oriented programming advice is this code violating? Note: please just answer this in your head, not in the…
Lately I’ve become increasingly sensitive to how little time I have left to learn new technologies. It’s not that I’m nearing death: I’m not, at least not by…
There it was, right in my inbox: If you go ahead and make those changes, we’ll come on board and send you a check for $75,000. 75 grand was a buncha cash for…
Programmers love to discuss interviewing programmers. And hate to discuss it. Interviewing touches the very heart of human social interaction: It’s a process…
As a developer, you spend 90% of your time on code-related activities like reading and maintaining existing code. With such a large chunk of time spent on these…
The end of the beginning, and the beginning of the end It was January, and the weather was fucking bleak. It’d been freezing and overcast for as long as I could…
Of course Facebook doesn’t “edit” NewsFeed in the same way that a newspaper editor once edited the front page. It’s a very different way. That’s why we’re…
Recruiters are not my most favorite people in the tech eco-system. They’re the people that will contact you on behalf of some client (the company that pays…
This is a simple web application for a group of employees to find out their average salary without exposing any individual salary information to anyone in the group, or storing any private information on the server.
ShellCheck is a static analysis and linting tool for sh/bash scripts. It’s mainly focused on handling typical beginner and intermediate level syntax errors and…
This is a simple web application for a group of employees to find out their average salary without exposing any individual salary information to anyone in the…
Today we are announcing our intent to phase out non-secure HTTP. There’s pretty broad agreement that HTTPS is the way forward for the web. In recent months,…
When I started on the Firebird team at Bazaarvoice, I was happy to learn that they host their code on GitHub and review and land changes via pull requests. I…
Is software antifragile? I think so. I recently finished the book Antifragile – Things that Gain from Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. I liked it a lot, and…
I’ll never forget the first time I used the World Wide Web. It was in the early 1990s. I was in America visiting my girlfriend (now wife) at her college in Massachusetts. This was before Mosaic, the first graphical web browser, was released. There were no images on the web, but I was still stunned by the scope of what I experienced. Even back then, the web seemed limitless, without edges. That Encarta CD-ROM sitting next to the computer suddenly seemed pathetically constrained.
In her new book No One Understands You and What To Do About It , Heidi Grant Halvorson tells readers a story about her friend, Tim. When Tim started a new job…
Here is my list of heuristics and rules of thumb for software development that I have found useful over the years: Development 1. Start small, then extend.…
Shannon Liss-Riordan rolls a small black suitcase out of the ugly federal courthouse in San Francisco. She’s smiling, just a fraction. No wonder: She just won a little victory against Uber.
You didn’t mean to end up here. You didn’t even see it coming. It all started with a chance to earn a living doing something you loved. Your dream job. Creating…
Podcasts
I listened to the following:
- Back to Work Ep. 217: “The Worst Most Advanced Teenager”
- Ruby Rogues Ep. 192: “Vagrant with Mitchell Hashimoto”
- Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Ep. 142: “142: The Power of Play (Justin Gitlin)”
- Ruby Rogues Ep. 200: “200th Episode Free-For-All!”
- Accidental Tech Podcast Ep. 114: “So far, so OK”
- Back to Work Ep. 218: “ The Tigers in Your Kitchen”
- Ruby Rogues Ep. 202: “The Struggles New Ruby Users Have with Jake Day Williams”
- The Bike Shed Ep. 13: “Begrudging Applause”
- Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Ep. 145: “YOLO! push to master (Sam Phippen)”
- Aaron Patterson guest stars
- Back to Work Ep. 218: “The Tigers in Your Kitchen”
- Accidental Tech Podcast Ep. 115: “Empathy for the Machine”
- Ruby Rogues Ep. 203: “Design and Sketching with CSS with Sean Fioritto”
- The Bike Shed Ep. 14: “An Acceptable Level of Hassle”
- David Heinemeier Hansson guest stars
For some background on what’s going on here, see the first tool sharpening post