July 15, 2007
What are you doing for the next 6 months?
Justice Grey has publicly committed to reading 27 developer books in the next 6 months
It's a big undertaking and the question has been asked - when will he get the time to do some programming?
I guess he has some funding!
Anyway, at first glance, the books I would like to get from his list are:
- Beyond Code - Setty
- Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code - Fowler
- Pragmatic Programmer - Andrew Hunt
I would have to research the rest of the list a bit but I think definitely an algorithm book, more patterns books and more UML will be in my near-future reading list.
It's strange that once you start learning about all this stuff you actually want to learn more - since I started grokking OO and patterns my view of programming has changed immensely. I am actually looking forward to the future and previously hairy application analysis have been simplified.
Looking forward to the next 6 months - the first three are being taken up by my first professional coding role and the following three - who knows!
Looking forward to the positive uncertainty.
Posted by dottie at 2:37 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
July 14, 2007
SCRUM solo - still vapour...
I've been readin up a bit on the SCRUM process and I think it might be possible to build a tool that forces you to look at your project from different viewpoints in order to set your goals and report to yourself successfully and possibly even help with rationalising the development process.
If you have a task which is constantly going over deadline then the system can focus on that and ask questions to help you frame your thoughts on the task objectively.
Then key to the system would be the developer - they have to want to use the system and be comfortable thinking outside their daily concerns.
I just might work dammit!
Now, more study...
Posted by dottie at 12:49 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Meet the stack of books that has kept me busy for the last while
Not even a quarter of the way through this monster...
The list from top to bottom:
- C.J. Date - Database in depth (status : skimmed)
- Mike Gunderloy - From Coder to Developer (status : half way through)
- Onion & Brown - Essential ASP.NET 2.0 (status : halfway through)
- LIberty and Hurwitz - Programming ASP.NET (status : reference)
- MCTS - .NET Framework 2.0 Training kits (status : cracked)
- Cwalina & Abrams - Framework design guidelines (status : dipping)
- Onion - Essential ASP (status : half-read)
- Fowler - Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture (status : bits read and lots browsed
The best books of the lot are: the two Onion books, Gunderloy, and Fowler.
And this doesn't include the Ruby books I want to get my head around too!
Posted by dottie at 12:46 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 26, 2007
SCRUM - possible to solo?
I've been doing a lot of reading lately regarding development - practices, frameworks, patterns, testing.
It's about time I properly formalised the whole thing; not having had the 'luck' to attend a programming course of any ilk, I've had to go it alone, and mostly down blind alleys.
One thing that has always plagued me is the lack of a formal development methodology. I do use source control and I analyse, plan, prepare and document - its when I get into the nitty-gritty that things tend to go a little haywire.
I've decided that for the upcoming development work I'll be doing (on my own...sniff) I'll try and implement a SCRUM methodology.
Part of this will include working out how to keep the methodology applied. The sprint planning etc. is already in place, mostly, but the daily and milestone SCRUMs could be an issue. I reckon a checklist can be useful to force myself to be objective about what has to be done, what has been done and where the problems lie.
Wrap it all up into some journaling tool and it could be a goer.
It'll be an interesting exercise if nothing else.
Now to Google and see if anyone else has managed it...
Posted by dottie at 1:07 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack