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

Monday, August 26, 2013

Interesting Talk: "Responsive Design"

Today I watched this great talk by Kent Beck:

In it, he talks about the patterns, values and principles that drive his design decisions.

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.

Saturday, August 10, 2013

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.