Learn how to be a wildly successful small business programmer

Tag: Books

The ONE chart every developer MUST understand

Our industry is famous for delivering projects late and over budget. Many projects are cancelled outright and many others never deliver anything near the value we promised our customers. And yet, there is a subset of software development organizations that consistently deliver excellent results. And they’ve known how to do it since the 1970s. In this post I’ll tell you their secret.

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Book Summary: “The Coaching Habit”

Stop me if this sounds like you. Somewhere along the way someone put you in charge of something at your job. Maybe you’re coaching a new hire, maybe you’re a technical lead on a small team, or maybe you’re running a whole project. Regardless of what you’re managing, you need to deal with people and that’s not going quite as well as you had hoped because managing programmers is hard. And it can be hard on your sanity.

(As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.)

Maybe you even picked up a book or two about management in the hopes that you’d find something–some trick or skill–to help you manage your people better. I can tell you from experience that most of those books are crap. But there are a couple of exceptions and in this post I want to give you a summary of one of them: The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever (paid link) by Michael Bungay Stanier.

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Why I can’t recommend Clean Architecture by Robert C. Martin

Clean Architecture failed to meet my expectations on a number of fronts. Despite Mr. Martin’s obvious passion for the topic, Clean Architecture is poorly organized, lacks examples, and is silent on working with existing systems. The author missed a major opportunity to teach us when and how to apply these lessons to our own systems. Let me explain.

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4 books guaranteed to make you a better programmer

Figuring out what to work on next is one of the hardest problems in software engineering.

I know that’s a bold statement but I believe there’s ample evidence to support my claim. In a recent post, I talked about the value of always working on the most important thing. In it I wrote:

It’s difficult to identify the most important thing [to work on next] because the solution space is huge and it’s difficult to compare stories. But I’ve found the Theory of Constraints to be a helpful way to quickly zero in on high value areas without looking at the whole business in excruciating detail.

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Books I read in 2017

In this post, I’m going to share some of the books I read this year. In the nonfiction realm, some of them are very much on point for software developers. Others are just good books that let you know what’s going on in the world.

In fiction, I’m drawn to technology-driven Sci-Fi. I found some great reads this year. I also listed some books at the bottom of this post that weren’t that good. I think it’s just as important to tell you about the good books as the not so good books.

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