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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

#241

Post by d0gsg0w00f »

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…

I don't know why but I've always loved reading technical content cover to cover. It started with cereal boxes when I was a kid and I would read ALL of the text. In my teens it was MaximumPC and 4Wheeler magazine that I would read cover to cover. Now I buy random tech books for things I want to know about like Hadoop, KVM virtualization, Code Complete, etc.

Re: Books that changed my career as a software engineer

#242

Post by analog31 »

pydry wrote: post #239
Aeolun wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love the Mythical Man-Month, but it’s one of those books that only software engineers seem to read, and they already know what’s in it.

It has a tendency to rankle managers trying to boost their headcount. It's difficult to get a man to understand something when their raise depends upon them not understanding it. I can still remember when the CTO I argued with came into the room one day and said that he'd been given the green light to hire as many additional people as he liked. He was grinning from ear to ear. I suspect he knew it wouldn't actually f…

I've found if a book or idea doesn't come to them through their own network, then it's easily just dismissed. Especially if the book is nearing a half century old. About the saying that adding people to a late project makes it later, the simple retort was: "But we have agile scrum." End of discussion.

Re: Books that changed my career as a software engineer

#243

Post by Sebguer »

ok_dad wrote: post #127
Sebguer wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly found the writing in the Phoenix Project painful, but I'm surprised you're the only one to mention it since I've heard it come up a fair bit elsewhere. I think it's probably more popular in the more traditional IT world than HN's typical audience.

I'm not very particular about reading so I'll just steam ahead on even the crappiest books. For nonfiction books I mostly put myself in the mindset of learning or conceptualizing the content in a more abstract way, like building a mind map. For fiction, I picture the story like a movie, which distracts me from bad writing, so this book hit that sweet spot for me, personally, where I could imagine the world and the ev…

It didn't invent the term. John Allspaw and Paul Hammond maybe did, in this talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdOe18KhtT4 (from the comments, I guess this talk is actually referenced in the book?)

Other places credit Patrick Debois who ran the first devopsday in the same year: https://newrelic.com/devops/what-is-devops

Re: Books that changed my career as a software engineer

#244

Post by pydry »

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.

>Interesting. This is the first time I've seen Robert Martin to be referred to as a fraud.

I'm not sure if fraud is quite the right word but he gets a lot of flak on HN for being something of a religious fanatic. E.g. the top comment in this thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26153823

Re: Books that changed my career as a software engineer

#245

Post by mohoromitch »

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…

I personally think that it goes deeper than just the ability to read and absorb. You to ask, and understand the motivations _for_ reading something, otherwise it's going to feel like a chore. I just finished "How to Take Smart Notes" and it seriously changed how I view readings like this. Where it's not for a short term gain, but rather an incremental increase in my knowledge base.

The content may not be super relevant immediately, but the book and (really simple) methodology of taking notes on these readings and graphing relationships between concepts means you're slowly building a network of knowledge that grows and becomes more powerful over time.

I used to but now it feels like a fun game to me.

Re: Books that changed my career as a software engineer

#246

Post by tartoran »

mavelikara wrote: post #130
digianarchist wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has sat on my shelf for my ten year career and I've never read it. Are there any up-to-date resources to help approach the text?

The videos from a class the authors gave in 1986 are available online ( https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2Op3QLzMgSY ). I highly recommend those, if reading the text is not your style.

This is a gem!!

Re: Books that changed my career as a software engineer

#247

Post by gaws »

Jtsummers wrote: post #39
lovecg wrote: post #22

I’ve read The Pragmatic Programmer. It’s not a bad book - I was nodding along the whole way. And that’s sort of the problem with the books of this genre. The thing is, I recognize that these are good techniques because I already spent lots of time applying them. I just don’t know if the idea of compressing years of hands on experience into a textbook works well in practice. This goes for most self-help books as well.

It's a good book at a certain stage in your career. Before that it's too easy to misconstrue it as absolutist (it isn't) or misunderstand the guidance (like DRY, which got a major rewrite in the 2nd edition to help with that). Too late in your career and it is all "obvious" (if you're a competent programmer). On the other hand, as a mentor I found it useful to re-read it (or, read it through properly, I'd read large…

> It's a good book at a certain stage in your career.

Such as?

Re: Books that changed my career as a software engineer

#248

Post by JaggerJo »

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…

agree. I’ve inherited codebases from new “architects” who seemingly have just read GoF.

Re: Books that changed my career as a software engineer

#249

Post by ok_dad »

Sebguer wrote: post #243
ok_dad wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not very particular about reading so I'll just steam ahead on even the crappiest books. For nonfiction books I mostly put myself in the mindset of learning or conceptualizing the content in a more abstract way, like building a mind map. For fiction, I picture the story like a movie, which distracts me from bad writing, so this book hit that sweet spot for me, personally, where I could imagine the world and the ev…

It didn't invent the term. John Allspaw and Paul Hammond maybe did, in this talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdOe18KhtT4 (from the comments, I guess this talk is actually referenced in the book?) Other places credit Patrick Debois who ran the first devopsday in the same year: https://newrelic.com/devops/what-is-devops

Thanks, my memory gets a bit fuzzy after a while.

Re: Books that changed my career as a software engineer

#250

Post by headmelted »

mjburgess wrote: post #214
thewakalix wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe some people take to programming like a fish to water, but plenty of others struggled at first. Knowing when to give up is important, but part of that is knowing when not to give up. That is a complicated and individual question; an ignorant gatekeeper who discourages anyone who's not immediately successful isn't helping here.

The gordon-ramsey (army coach, sports coach, theatre director, ballet director...) school of "encouragement" prescribes the opposite. That is: if you arent passionate enough to overcome discouragement, you arent passionate enough to excel. Of course, we dont need excellent programmers en-mass. However, it is interesting to observe that this "egotistic troupe leader" is a fairly common form of small-group excellence-s…

So I’ve thought about this in the years since.

Here’s the thing though: the person in question was already struggling, as a new person in an office of people with experience, without assistance from their manager.

For their boss to tell them some variant of “you’re not cut out for this” in that vulnerable of a position when you have no frame of reference (and when it’s from the same manager that was supposed to have been helping you) is wildly different to hearing that from an impartial peer.

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