The Secrets of Consulting by Gerald Weinberg, Dorset House Publishing
20 December 2013What a let down.
December, 2013
Algorithms in a Nutshell by Heineman, Pollice and Selkow, O'Reilly Media
04 December 2013Good reference book.
November, 2013
The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt and Jeff Cox, Gower Publishing Limited
05 November 2013A really good read!
April, 2013
Programming, a Subset of Writing
14 April 2013A while back I read a post by David Hansson on the five programming books that meant the most to him. In the post he made the comment that he considered programming to be a subset of writing - I had never considered this before. Inspired by his post I...
January, 2013
Changing Paradigms
03 January 2013I have always been a Windows person. I was there in the early days when the world made the move from Dos to Windows. I was there when the start button was introduced in Windows 95 and I was there during the fail days of Windows Me. I have been...
November, 2012
Strangling the life out of Software Testing
21 November 2012Incentivizing Work with Development Teams
02 November 2012Recently I saw someone on twitter asking about incentives and if anyone had past experience with incentivizing work. I promised to respond with some of the experiences I have had in the past so here goes…
October, 2012
Refactoring FizzBuzz
15 October 2012A few years ago I blogged about FizzBuzz, at the time the post was prompted by Scott Hanselman who had podcasted about how surprized he was that some programmers could not even solve the FizzBuzz problem within a reasonable period of time during a job interview.
September, 2012
The cost of Programmer Team Clustering
30 September 2012I recently was involved in a conversation about the productivity of programmers and the seemingly wide range in abilities that different programmers have in this industry. Some of the comments made were reiterated a few days later when I came across a chapter in Code Complete (v2) where it says...
It is not quantifiably better
19 September 2012An interesting statement I have heard recently in one of the organizations that I have been working with is that some of the agile processes that we are implementing are not quanitfiably better than the traditional processes they had before. This seemed to be the motivation for not moving the...
Principles vs. Process
17 September 2012I recently had an interesting experience with a new team learning Scrum. The team came from a hierarchical background where they were very process oriented. For the first few sprints of scrum the team went through the normal forming stage and then all of a sudden it all began to...
The challenge of giving a positive No
07 September 2012I find it ironic that the more I am involved in the software industry, the more apparent it becomes that soft skills are just as if not more important than the technical abilities of a developer. One of the biggest challenges I have faced in my career is in managing...
Lessons learnt in implementing Scrum in a Large Organization that has traditional values
04 September 2012I recently had the experience of being involved in a “test” scrum implementation in a large organization that was used to a traditional project management approach. Here are some lessons that I learnt from it.
August, 2012
Minimum team development sizes
29 August 2012Disclaimer - these are observations that I have had, I am not sure if this follows the philosophy of scrum, agile or whatever, but most of these insights were gained while implementing a scrum scenario.
Legacy Code Retreat Questions
27 August 2012I recently heard of the concept of a Legacy Code Retreat. Since I have attended and helped facilitate some normal Code Retreats I thought it might be interesting in trying a Legacy Code Retreat, but I have a few questions on how a legacy CR differs from a normal one....
Cool site for learning editor shortcuts
23 August 2012This gets my vote for cool site of the month
VSNomad – Interesting Cross Mobile Platform Development from Visual Studio
07 August 2012I have recently been looking at VSNomad - a Visual Studio extension RedGate is working on to target IOS and Android development using Visual Studio as your IDE.
July, 2012
The Mythical Man-Month by Frederick Brooks, Addison-Wesley
26 July 2012The book is dated but still provides some interesting insights into the complexity of software development. The two highlights were the chapter on the man month and no silver bullet chapter. The phrase Productivity follows Quality also resonated with me. In essence this book is a classic - some points...
The human multitasking problem – the cost of a context switch
17 July 2012I had an interesting meeting with a team that is currently facing some challenges getting work done. After working with them for a few days a major issue that cropped up was the amount of context switching that they were experiencing between projects. Each team member is handling several projects...
June, 2012
The Productive Programmer by Ford, O'Reilly
01 June 2012This book has a combination of tips and tricks for utilities as well as general practices. The tips and tricks are mostly outdated and did not add any real value. The practices I found useful and worth reading.
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