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Books that changed my career as a software engineer

julianogtz.github.io

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Re: Books that changed my career as a software engineer

#161

Post by aesyondu »

Osiris wrote: post #61

Is it just me or do other people struggle to read these kinds of very technical books? It's not that I don't comprehend, it's that my brain finds it boring and hard to focus. I think I have trained my brain so much on rapid skimming of websites for useful info, while throwing away most of the content, that I tend to do the same with books, which really doesn't work well. Has anyone found alternative ways to consume t…

Same. What I did was to limit (minimum and maximum) myself to 1 chapter/section per day of a singular book that I decided to focus on. That way it becomes a habit.

Minimum means that I need to finish it that day no matter what.

I put a maximum because I found through trial and error that if I push myself too hard, even if a topic is interesting, I burn out quickly and procrastinate, sometimes for months, before continuing reading said book. And that is worst case scenario for me.

Re: Books that changed my career as a software engineer

#162

Post by wiseowise »

dvt wrote: post #46
gameswithgo wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do in fact seem to negative, and have a take on life that is a bit more cynical than reality. Completely dismissing any value in actually being a good engineer for career advancement for instance is a bit over the top. Suggesting companies always don’t care about employee opinions as well. Real life is pretty bad sometimes but not universally dystopian.

> Suggesting companies always don’t care about employee opinions as well. Ah yes, the same companies that laid off mass numbers of engineers in 2000 and did it all over again in 2008. The same companies that vehemently fight any kind of unionization efforts and the same companies that insist to haze potential hires with live-coding & whiteboarding tests even though folks have 10+ years of experience. The same compani…

> that insist to haze potential hires with live-coding & whiteboarding tests even though folks have 10+ years of experience.

Don't see any problem here. I've met my share of "10+" years of "experience".

Re: Books that changed my career as a software engineer

#163

Post by loves_mangoes »

throwaway1988-5 wrote: post #153
throwaway1988-5 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Found out that I have ADHD. Never managed to read any books about programming, after a few pages my brain starts making up excuses to do other things and I start rereading the same paragraph over and over again. No issues doing the actual programming, could sit for hours on end without any issues. One nifty thing about my ADHD is that something that was super interesting can become dull as hell. For no apparent reaso…

A little trick for technical articles that I've found is to use screen readers.

Screen readers work great, for me it's my phone. On my desktop I'd be getting distracted and bored in about two paragraphs. Even if I try to come back to the article, there's invariable 3 other things that I'm switching between.

On my phone I've read 250k word books cover to cover, same books I could never read on a PC. Attention is weird like that.

Another trick is getting your dopamine* externally. There's an association between ADHD and substance abuse, and I can see why. Pharmacology is a cheat code: a few hours of infinite motivation, will power, and attention.

Unfortunately, when people start needing a substance just to feel normal, that is the definition of an addiction.

(* More complicated than just Dopamine or Serotonin, both seem to play a role. Medecine has not solved this one yet.)

Re: Books that changed my career as a software engineer

#164

Post by aesyondu »

wiseowise wrote: post #158
baash05 wrote: post #136

Clean code... To this day I cringe when I see methods/functions over 20 lines long.. Or when I see commented code blocks in one function.. Other have mentioned The Mythical Man Month, and I'd say it's a great book. Sadly, more often than not, it's something I wish I could staple to managements foreheads. "read this now before our next planning session" The Rspec book was a great book, that helped me fully embrace TDD…

> Clean code... To this day I cringe when I see methods/functions over 20 lines long.. Or when I see commented code blocks in one function.. To this day I cringe when I see dogmatic opinions of a fraud taken like an absolute truth.

Interesting. This is the first time I've seen Robert Martin to be referred to as a fraud. I'd like to read an elaboration of this.

I looked around and found this video [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mb9VPWbrqmE][Uncle Bob (Robert Martin) is a Fraud!!!]] but most of the comments are dismissive of the review.

Re: Books that changed my career as a software engineer

#165

Post by educatedfool »

dorinlazar wrote: post #76

I have a terrible problem with people recommending books that „changed their whatever”. And sometimes I think that it comes from an arrogant place where people being „influenced” by books is a bad place. But I do understand that sometimes books can change the way one thinks about things, and it makes sense to make a list of those. For me, there are books that had a negative impact on my work. The GoF book is one such…

I cannot second this enough. Uncle Bob et all have done imeasurable bad to a lot past and future devs generations.

Advocating for a perverted cloudy way of overengineered sw that builds cvs and horrible enterprise sw.

There are much better ppl to read out there. Anyone actually writing long lived sw. Linus, sam neal, anyone actually DOING it rather than living off self indulgent books.

Re: Books that changed my career as a software engineer

#166

Post by deelly »

MonaroVXR wrote: post #156
baash05 wrote: post #136

Clean code... To this day I cringe when I see methods/functions over 20 lines long.. Or when I see commented code blocks in one function.. Other have mentioned The Mythical Man Month, and I'd say it's a great book. Sadly, more often than not, it's something I wish I could staple to managements foreheads. "read this now before our next planning session" The Rspec book was a great book, that helped me fully embrace TDD…

>1984... This one terrified me so much, that I have to include it. I write code much more securely because of it. What book?

1984

Re: Books that changed my career as a software engineer

#167

Post by misja111 »

dorinlazar wrote: post #76

I have a terrible problem with people recommending books that „changed their whatever”. And sometimes I think that it comes from an arrogant place where people being „influenced” by books is a bad place. But I do understand that sometimes books can change the way one thinks about things, and it makes sense to make a list of those. For me, there are books that had a negative impact on my work. The GoF book is one such…

> One such people screwed my career development for 7 years

The problem was with this person, not so much with the GoF book. In present days this person might have become an FP fundamentalist and come up with some exotic category theory quiz question that he was very fond of himself. The GoF book is now of course outdated but the idea of categorizing best practices from the industry was a good one. Unfortunately many good ideas will be abused by people who lack the common sense to know how and where to apply them. A similar thing has happened to the agile software development movement, to microservices architecture (every service is a microservice?!), unit testing (people trying to reach 100% coverage).

Re: Books that changed my career as a software engineer

#169

Post by magnus_blackarm »

MonaroVXR wrote: post #156
baash05 wrote: post #136

Clean code... To this day I cringe when I see methods/functions over 20 lines long.. Or when I see commented code blocks in one function.. Other have mentioned The Mythical Man Month, and I'd say it's a great book. Sadly, more often than not, it's something I wish I could staple to managements foreheads. "read this now before our next planning session" The Rspec book was a great book, that helped me fully embrace TDD…

>1984... This one terrified me so much, that I have to include it. I write code much more securely because of it. What book?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four

Re: Books that changed my career as a software engineer

#170

Post by nickelpro »

aesyondu wrote: post #164
wiseowise wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Clean code... To this day I cringe when I see methods/functions over 20 lines long.. Or when I see commented code blocks in one function.. To this day I cringe when I see dogmatic opinions of a fraud taken like an absolute truth.

Interesting. This is the first time I've seen Robert Martin to be referred to as a fraud. I'd like to read an elaboration of this. I looked around and found this video [[ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mb9VPWbrqmE][Uncle Bob (Robert Martin) is a Fraud!!!]] but most of the comments are dismissive of the review.

The examples in Clean Code are bad and would never make it through modern code review.

qntm did an extensive overview of this: https://qntm.org/clean

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