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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

#201

Post by goodpoint »

dgellow wrote: post #139
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…

Have you tried audiobooks? It helps me a lot to do something boring, like cleaning the kitchen or emptying/filling the dishwasher, while I consume content. Somehow when my body is doing something in automated mode I can focus well on my thoughts or audio/video content. Audiobooks and podcasts are perfect for this, videos are a bit more difficult as you’re likely to miss something, and text content is not adapted at a…

I've never found a podcast that is not full of idle chatter. Admittedly I gave up searching after trying some astonishingly dull ones.

The only exception was a Linux kernel podcast but the format was really unsuitable for the topic.

Do you have any good technical podcast to recommend?

Re: Books that changed my career as a software engineer

#202

Post by benji-york »

janto wrote: post #190
sriku wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is right, however we also need to acknowledge the prevalence of books which put forth some good ideas, but which perhaps can be summarized in a page or so. Instead they choose to labor on and on around the same point(s) without adding much. A book that definitely wasn't in the category I described above (for me) was John Ousterhout's Philosophy of Software Design - https://www.amazon.com/Philosophy-Software-Desi…

From the reviews it sounds mainly from the OO/Java and heavy design up front paradigm and not very Agile / test driven. Is that fair? I'd really like a philosophically minded book that integrates these relatively newer approaches.

I consider myself very agile/test-driven-leaning and I got a lot out of the book. It provided nice restatements of many things I've vaguely thought over the years and some nice new ideas.

Re: Books that changed my career as a software engineer

#203

Post by Aeolun »

headmelted wrote: post #197
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #180

The one thing that I find is not helpful, is the “litmus test” approach. i.e. “You are a bad programmer/engineer/scientist/person, because you did not read this book, or know this technique.” Thing. I see this frequently. As a [mostly] self-taught software developer, I’ve been on the receiving end of a lot of this behavior. In my case, I have a real “Oh yeah? I’ll show you!” streak. I became expert at stuff, simply b…

Fun story I like to tell people about exactly this. A little over a decade ago I was working a gig at the software subsidiary of a fairly large non-tech multinational. It was a lot of mostly nice people and a mix of skills and experience as you’d expect. Anyway - there was a manager (M) on a project I was on who was.. unpleasant. They had quite an ego, and were very much the type to pass blame down the chain. Regardl…

I was really hoping for some karma in this story, but it wasn’t there :(

Re: Books that changed my career as a software engineer

#204

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

headmelted wrote: post #197
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #180

The one thing that I find is not helpful, is the “litmus test” approach. i.e. “You are a bad programmer/engineer/scientist/person, because you did not read this book, or know this technique.” Thing. I see this frequently. As a [mostly] self-taught software developer, I’ve been on the receiving end of a lot of this behavior. In my case, I have a real “Oh yeah? I’ll show you!” streak. I became expert at stuff, simply b…

Fun story I like to tell people about exactly this. A little over a decade ago I was working a gig at the software subsidiary of a fairly large non-tech multinational. It was a lot of mostly nice people and a mix of skills and experience as you’d expect. Anyway - there was a manager (M) on a project I was on who was.. unpleasant. They had quite an ego, and were very much the type to pass blame down the chain. Regardl…

Thanks for sharing that. It makes me angry; just hearing this, thirdhand, and a decade later.

I was a manager at a company that paid “competitive” (i.e. “low”) salaries.

A significant part of my job was identifying “diamonds in the rough,” and helping to train and nurture them; then, encourage them to stay.

I feel that I did fairly well, here. When they finally shut down our team, the person with the least seniority had a decade.

These were senior C++ developers. They could have gone anywhere.

Re: Books that changed my career as a software engineer

#205

Post by mjburgess »

headmelted wrote: post #197
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #180

The one thing that I find is not helpful, is the “litmus test” approach. i.e. “You are a bad programmer/engineer/scientist/person, because you did not read this book, or know this technique.” Thing. I see this frequently. As a [mostly] self-taught software developer, I’ve been on the receiving end of a lot of this behavior. In my case, I have a real “Oh yeah? I’ll show you!” streak. I became expert at stuff, simply b…

Fun story I like to tell people about exactly this. A little over a decade ago I was working a gig at the software subsidiary of a fairly large non-tech multinational. It was a lot of mostly nice people and a mix of skills and experience as you’d expect. Anyway - there was a manager (M) on a project I was on who was.. unpleasant. They had quite an ego, and were very much the type to pass blame down the chain. Regardl…

I can't speak to this story itself, but I wonder about the general principal underneath these sorts of objections.

That is: we should just be naively encouraging of people to pursue whatever they happen to be trying to pursue. This seems born of a boomer-era "be yourself" world view in which "anything is possible". I think this cheats people a great deal.

When physics is demonstrated in schools and TV as some game, it shouldnt take until Masters to figure out it isnt. Programming likewise.

What I see in this culture of "be yourself" is really an admonishment for not "trying to be successful", in the narrowest sense, ie., blindly pursuing programming even though you're not suited to it.

People shouldn't be hoodwinked into careers they arent going to like on the basis they "should like them" because presumably "anyone can be successful" and "everyone needs encouragement". Underneath this ideology is a very narrow notion of success, and a very concerning lack of empathy.

"Encouragement" isnt a neutral good; it's an instrument to develop people -- often in one's own image. There's a lot of people "encouraged" into career's that depress them.

Re: Books that changed my career as a software engineer

#206

Post by Copenjin »

educatedfool wrote: post #165
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.

I agree and hope that no one will come here commenting in favour of the uncle&co, what relevant software have they actually written? And how much time has been lost refactoring code from people that mindlessly followed their extremely simplified recommendations and toy examples? Let's forget them please.

Re: Books that changed my career as a software engineer

#207

Post by [deleted] »

mjburgess wrote: post #205
headmelted wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fun story I like to tell people about exactly this. A little over a decade ago I was working a gig at the software subsidiary of a fairly large non-tech multinational. It was a lot of mostly nice people and a mix of skills and experience as you’d expect. Anyway - there was a manager (M) on a project I was on who was.. unpleasant. They had quite an ego, and were very much the type to pass blame down the chain. Regardl…

I can't speak to this story itself, but I wonder about the general principal underneath these sorts of objections. That is: we should just be naively encouraging of people to pursue whatever they happen to be trying to pursue. This seems born of a boomer-era "be yourself" world view in which "anything is possible". I think this cheats people a great deal. When physics is demonstrated in schools and TV as some game, i…

[deleted]

Re: Books that changed my career as a software engineer

#208

Post by Copenjin »

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…

>To this day I cringe when I see methods/functions over 20 lines long..

Wait until you have to follow dozens of 5 lines methods for the sake of unrequited abstraction that could have been compacted in an easier to read 30 line method.

Re: Books that changed my career as a software engineer

#209

Post by criddell »

wokwokwok wrote: post #106
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…

You don’t need to read these books end to end. The a builds on b builds on c style of learning is only one way of learning things, and in many cases, the foundations (a, b) serve you no real value. Just jump to the sections that interest you (c) and go back to previous sections if you feel like you’ve lost track of what they’re talking about. For example, the first 20 pages of ‘Remote’ cover why remote working is goo…

Books have been written on how to read a book.

Often, it’s some variant of starting with studying the table of contents then doing a fast first pass of the text. That’s usually a pretty good way of figuring out where to start.

Re: Books that changed my career as a software engineer

#210

Post by Aeolun »

1ibsq wrote: post #177
lordnacho wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those concentration drugs that you hear about, do they work? I've heard that a lot of students use them, but I'm a little bit wary of using something like that.

They do. If you don't have a diagnose, be careful with it. You want to be able to execute challenging mental tasks without it. You will still be able to do that after trying such medication, but you will always know, there would be a easier way to do it and that can become a mental block.

That seems very unlikely. At least compared to the chance of the drugs having an unmitigated positive effect.
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