Last month we finished reading “The Effective Engineer” by Edmond Lau in the book club at work. It is a great book full of practical advice on how to get more done as a software developer. In fact, it is one of the three books I think all programmers would benefit from reading (the other two are Code Complete and The Pragmatic Programmer).
For several years now, we have been running a developer book club at work. We pick a book relevant to software development, and read a chapter a week. Every other week we meet for 30 to 45 minutes and discuss what we have read. It is quite popular and useful, so I thought I would describe how we do it, and why having a book club at work is a good idea. Continue reading
In the book club at work, we recently finished reading Release It! by Michael T. Nygard. It is a book I have been meaning to read for a long time, but somehow I never got around to it until now. It was written in 2007, and it is starting to show its age in several respects. Despite this, there is still a lot of relevant advice on how to make software work well in production.
I finally got around to reading Clean Code by Robert C. Martin (Uncle Bob). It is often high on lists of the best books for software development, and for good reason. Clean Code is an excellent book that all programmers should read. Here is what I liked and didn’t like about it. Continue reading
Is software antifragile? I think so. I recently finished the book Antifragile – Things that Gain from Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. I liked it a lot, and I think the ideas in it are quite useful when examining various systems and phenomena. What especially struck me when reading it was how much of it applies to software development. These are the main themes: Continue reading
When I found out about the book “How Google Tests Software“, it didn’t take long until I had ordered a copy. I find it quite fascinating to read about how Google does things, whether it is about their development process, their infrastructure, their hiring process, or, in this case, how they test their software. I am a developer at heart, but I have worked for a few years as a tester, so testing is also dear to me.
It’s quite an interesting book, and it makes some great points about the future of testing. However, despite the phrase “Help me test like Google” on the cover, it is not as useful as I had hoped when it comes to improving your own testing. Continue reading
Henrik Warne's blog 