Smart & Gets Things Done Joel Spolsky Apress, 2007 This book represents Joel Spolsky’s approach to hiring programmers. Smart & Gets Things Done is based on Spolsky’s weblog, like his previous book, Joel on Software. In this book, Joel brings together his various writings on hiring software developers. Not surprisingly, Joel bucks traditional wisdom on… Read More »
What is it with programmers who don’t read? Most of the best programmers I know are constantly learning. They seem to have an insatiable curiosity for any topic they are interested in. These programmers are often reading websites, books, and magazines almost constantly to help extend their knowledge and understanding. Others never seem to read… Read More »
I’m finally getting back to my blog after YAPC::NA. It’s been a while since I wrote, so I figured I would start off easy. Many months ago, I stumbled across yet another article describing how hard exceptions are (The Old New Thing : Cleaner, more elegant, and harder to recognize). It’s an old article and… Read More »
As a short break from my normal programming oriented blog entries, I figured I should comment about YAPC::NA 2007 which we (Houston.pm) are hosting. The conference is currently running (June 25 – 27) at University of Houston, Central Campus. Eight-ish months ago, Jeremy Fluhmann talked us into putting in a bid for YAPC. Despite quite… Read More »
I enjoy reading the Worse Than Failure site as an antidote for programmer arrogance. While a junior programmer might look down on the people who made the reported mistakes, those of us who have been in the business for a while can recognize many of the mistakes. They still make a good laugh. A few… Read More »
Learn to Program Chris Pine Pragmatic Bookshelf, 2006 Every now and then most programmers get asked the question, How do I get into programming? I am usually on the lookout for beginning books on programming, specifically for this reason. When I first saw Learn to Program from the Pragmatic Bookshelf, I thought it was probably… Read More »
Can just anyone learn to program or is that skill limited to a few of us? This question or some variant has been on my mind for most of my career. Early in my career, I thought programming required inherent talent, so only some people were capable of learning to program. As I gained more… Read More »
I ran across an unusual article a couple of months ago, Ethical Software by Alex Bunardzic » Right Tool for the Job is a Myth. My first thought was that the author must be out of his mind. After some reflection, I have a somewhat different view. Now I just think he is mistaken. I… Read More »
I don’t often write about something quite this geeky, but it is just too cool not to share. First Several months ago, I read about an interesting module for Linux called SSHFS. This module allows you to mount a file system over SSH. This gives a way to access files on another server that you… Read More »
Practical Subversion, second edition Daniel Berlin and Garrett Rooney Apress, 2006 Two years ago, I reviewed the first edition of Practical Subversion. The second edition has substantially updated the reference information about the Subversion commands. The previous edition had been based on a pre-1.0 version of the program and had somewhat incomplete coverage of the… Read More »