Friday, August 30, 2013

Books I read (January - August 2013)

January
- Matemàtica discreta. UOC. (2nd time)

February
- The New York Trilogy, Paul Auster

March
- The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Event-Driven Programming: Introduction, Tutorial, History, Stephen Pherg
- JavaScript Enlightenment, Cody Lindley

April
- El camino a un mejor programador, E. Manchado, J. Caraballo y Y. Darias
- The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley

May
- La Tumba (Grave Peril), Jim Butcher
- Implementation Patterns, Kent Beck
- User Stories Applied, Mike Cohn

June
- Implementation Patterns, Kent Beck (2nd time)

July
- Chapters 1-6 of Object-Oriented Analysis and Design With applications 2nd edition, Grady Booch

August
- Test-Driven Development By Example, Kent Beck (2nd time)
- Victus, Albert Sánchez Piñol
- El cuerpo humano (Il corpo umano), Paolo Giordano

Friday, August 23, 2013

Interesting talk: "Challenging requirements"

I've just watched this great talk by Gojko Adzic, the author of the Specification by Example book that I'm currently reading:
Thanks to Guillermo Pascual for recommending it in the Aprendices community.

Some talk highlights:
Refuse solutions to unknown problems:
understand what the real problem is and solve that.
Refuse suggestions to use a particular technology:
you know IT better than they do (if not, why have they hired you?).
Don't rush into solving the first problem they give you:
keep asking "why" (or "how would this be useful") until you get to the money.
Know your stakeholders:
who is going to use this and why?
Don't start with stories!:
Start with a very high level example of how people will use the system.
Great products come from understanding the real problem and whose problem it is.

Monday, August 5, 2013

Interesting talk: "TDD, where did it all go wrong"

I've recently watched this interesting talk by Ian Cooper:
He talks about ways of avoiding common problems that arise when TDD is not practised well.