Some books for agile programmers

I'm giving docs.google.com another try. I tried it over two years ago (wow, time flies) when Google Docs was still Writely. Oh, my prediction did come through (they got bought by Google), wuhu! So if this post gets doubly published it's because it got screwed up.

Update: docs.google.com didn't manage to publish the title properly. I also have to apply some tags manually. All the pictures and headings came through allright, though.

New books

I just got these books:

They're all from The Pragmatic Bookshelf, although I got them from Amazon (who sent them from New-Zealand, which gave me sort of a bad eco-concience for a while..) cause they were alot cheaper there.

The first title, The Pragmatic Programmer. Well, I'm sort of ashamed that I haven't read it before, being as famous as it is. However, I'm looking through the TOC, and I sort of get the feeling I've touched most of the points, either by hard realization and experience, or by advice from friends and colleagues. The book still provides me with a sturdy, well sorted and well formulated set of practices, which will help me communicate the QWAN to my consulted clients.

Practices of an Agile Developer looks like a follow-up to TPP. It's published in 2007, 7 years after. It seems to have more of a focus on collaboration and project management than on effective tool use (although the subjects do overlap).

The last book is written by two guys working for SAS, neither are part of the original PP pair. I got it because it's been a long while since I read any modern works on agile development, and agile stuff is quickly turning into my pressure point for some reasons yet to be announced publically :) The book also has a very nice looking section on Common problems and how to fix them. My team at work just shrunk down to 1,5 people, and we recently suffered almost a two month long sprint stumble (long story, and I'm still having trouble figuring out how I could've gotten it right). Hopefully the book has some advice I can apply to my own project.

All three books make up for three areas I care, and I think every IT-professional should care deeply about: Tools, languages and practices.

I just asked on twitter which book I should read first. I think I'll do Ship it! first, but might follow the advice of Olve and do TPP first. To be honest, after I finished studying I've been horrible at reading books. I have several books now that I started but never finished.

Oh, here's a wordle of my blog:

Very flash. I can't for the life of me remember who's blog I just read who pointed me at it. Sorry. There are a bit too many normal English words in the cloud, but some of the words are nice: pretty, people, good, stuff :)

Ok, let's push this thing to Blogger and see how it goes..

Comments

Open source CMS evaluations

I have now seen three more or less serious open source CMS reviews. First guy to hit the field was Matt Raible ( 1 2 3 4 ), ending up with Drupal , Joomla , Magnolia , OpenCms and MeshCMS being runner-ups. Then there is OpenAdvantage that tries out a handful ( Drupal , Exponent CMS , Lenya , Mambo , and Silva ), including Plone which they use for their own site (funny/annoying that the entire site has no RSS-feeds, nor is it possible to comment on the articles), following Matt's approach by exluding many CMS that seem not to fit the criteria. It is somewhat strange that OpenAdvantage cuts away Magnolia because it "Requires J2EE server; difficult to install and configure; more of a framework than CMS", and proceed to include Apache Lenya in the full evaluation. Magnolia does not require a J2EE server. It runs on Tomcat just like Lenya does (maybe it's an idea to bundle Magnolia with Jetty to make it seem more lightweight). I'm still sure that OpenAdvant

Considerations for JavaScript in Modern (2013) Java/Maven Projects

Disclaimer: I'm a Java developer, not a JavaScript developer. This is just what I've picked up the last years plus a little research the last days. It's just a snapshot of my current knowledge and opinions on the day of writing, apt to change over the next weeks/months. We've gone all modern in our web applications, doing MVC on the client side with AngularJS or Ember , building single-page webapps with REST backends. But how are we managing the growing amount of JavaScript in our application? Yeoman 's logo (not necessarily the conclusion of this blog post) You ain't in Kansas anymore So far we've just been doing half-random stuff. We download some version of a library and throw it into our src/main/webapp/js/lib , or we use it from a CDN , which may be down or unreachable when we want to use the application.. Some times the JS is minified, other times it's not. Some times we name the file with version number, other times without. Some

Git Stash Blooper (Could not restore untracked files from stash)

The other day I accidentally did a git stash -a , which means it stashes *everything*, including ignored output files (target, build, classes, etc). Ooooops.. What I meant to do was git stash -u , meaning stash modifications plus untracked new files. Anyhows, I ended up with a big fat stash I couldn't get back out. Each time I tried, I got something like this: .../target/temp/dozer.jar already exists, no checkout .../target/temp/core.jar already exists, no checkout .../target/temp/joda-time.jar already exists, no checkout .../target/foo.war already exists, no checkout Could not restore untracked files from stash No matter how I tried checking out different revisions (like the one where I actually made the stash), or using --force, I got the same error. Now these were one of those "keep cool for a second, there's a git way to fix this"situation. I figured: A stash is basically a commit. If we look at my recent commits using git log --graph --

Managing dot-files with vcsh and myrepos

Say I want to get my dot-files out on a new computer. Here's what I do: # install vcsh & myrepos via apt/brew/etc vcsh clone https://github.com/tfnico/config-mr.git mr mr update Done! All dot-files are ready to use and in place. No deploy command, no linking up symlinks to the files . No checking/out in my entire home directory as a Git repository. Yet, all my dot-files are neatly kept in fine-grained repositories, and any changes I make are immediately ready to be committed: config-atom.git -> ~/.atom/* config-mr.git -> ~/.mrconfig -> ~/.config/mr/* config-tmuxinator.git -> ~/.tmuxinator/* config-vim.git -> ~/.vimrc -> ~/.vim/* config-bin.git -> ~/bin/* config-git.git -> ~/.gitconfig config-tmux.git -> ~/.tmux.conf config-zsh.git -> ~/.zshrc How can this be? The key here is to use vcsh to keep track of your dot-files, and its partner myrepos/mr for o

Leaving eyeo

Thirteen blog posts later, this one notes my departure from eyeo after 4 years and 3 months. I joined eyeo around the headcount of 80 employees, and now I think there's just over 250 people there. My role coming in was as operations manager, doing a mix of infrastructure engineering and technical project management. I later on took on organizational development to help the company deal with its growing pains . We introduced cross-functional teams, departments (kind of like guilds), new leadership structures, goal-setting frameworks, onboarding processes and career frameworks. And all of this in a rapidly growing distributed company. I'm proud and happy that for a long time I knew every employee by name and got to meet every single new-hire through training them on company structure and processes. At some point, we had enough experienced leaders and organizational developers that I could zoom back in on working in one team, consulting them on Git and continuous integration