I often hear that summers are slow and that the software industry is dead between June 1st and Sept 1st. I don’t know about that. For me, the only thing I remember about the past couple of summers is lots of coding, refactoring, planning (repeat this cycle N times). That’s the reason for little blogging lately. However, to keep my sanity healthy, I read books. Below is some recommended reading should you have a similar reading taste.
Regardless of whether you are a zealous Christian, atheist or agnostic, this is a very educational book. Bruce Bawer provides a lot of interesting historical insight about the background of many of today’s “mainstream” churches.
I’ve attended a certain church (no names to protect the innocent) long enough and served high enough to see how deviation from the official agenda gets punished. This is Christian extremism in its finest. To be a true Christian, in my book (no pun intended), you need to be open-minded enough to evaluate both sides.
For example, Bruce Bawer is an outspoken homosexual, which adds an interesting twist to the story of this book. I don’t understand homosexuality, and my religious background didn’t have much empathy for “Christian homosexuals,” but I got myself to sit down and read this book without bias.
The book isn’t about being gay or straight, though. The book is a deep look at the difference between legalistic churches and their more liberal counterparts, as well as “establishments” which cater to both for a wider appeal.
If you still maintain you hold the ultimate truth and everybody else it bound for hell, move on. This isn’t your book. I once worshipped an angry and sadistic God too, who’d burn and torture all who believed differently from me in the due “dispensation of times.” But I don’t anymore.
This is another book by Bruce Bawer. As you can probably tell from my name, I have European roots. As far as I can tell, the author is dead-on right in his assessment of the problems Europeans brought on themselves by failing to integrate Muslim immigrants. It’s always easier to hide behind empty talk of placating extremists in the fear of hurting feelings and being racist.
In fact, that’s the sentiment I’ve heard many times over. For example, anybody who condemns Theo van Gogh’s murder with strong language, is labeled a “racist” or a “fascist.” As I watch security guards repossess everything liquid in the European airports, I have no question in my mind as to why this is happening. Find out for yourselves.
This book capitalizes very heavily on the classic Design Patterns and Martin Fowler’s Refactoring. Think of it as Fowler’s Refactoring on steroids. Examples in Refactoring to Patterns are much longer than those by Fowler as they involve more complicated real-life scenarios.
Fowler said it best: “Patterns are where you want to be; refactorings are ways to get there from somewhere else.” This, in a nutshell, is the spirit of Joshua Kerievsky’s book.
Why such long and involved examples? Joshua Kerievsky has a good rationale for this too:
“If you’d like to become a better software designer, studying the evolution of great software designs will be more valuable than studying the great designs themselves. For it is in the evolution that the real wisdom lies. The structures that result from the evolution can help you, but without knowing why they were evolved into a design, you’re more likely to misapply them or over-engineer with them on your next project.”
Great book. Highly recommend.
As if there isn’t enough religious strife, enter Extreme Programming (XP). The names of Kent Beck and Martin Fowler should ring a bell by now.
This book is an outline of XP tenets. Even though I don’t follow any dogma religiously, I find XP very similar to how we run development in our company.
Matt Berther has a recent story of conversion to agile methodology.
Over the past few years, Tim Russert of the Meet the Press fame, received close to 60,000 letters from people who wanted to share stories and memories of their fathers. Tim sifted through them all (!) and included some in his book Wisdom of Our Fathers. As such, it’s a breath-taking compilation of real-life stories with minimum commenting on Tim’s part.
Tim didn’t just pick letters of exemplary families. Some people openly said, “My father was a monster. He drank and beat me and my Mom.” So you get to read both good and bad accounts.
As I read the book, I noticed an interesting pattern (geek!). Every letter has the name of the person who sent it in, as well as the name of his/her father. Both their occupations are listed there too. As you flip pages and look at signatures, you see pretty much the same combination, e.g financial broker — metallurgist, educator — railroad worker, software engineer — factory worker, etc.
Only a generation ago, most of those parents held very down-to-earth jobs and built a whole new foundation for their children. It’s mind boggling to think that it happened in the course of only one generation! Many went on with only a high-school diploma to work at factories, farms. A lot of folks wrote they barely remembered their fathers because they worked two, three jobs to feed the family. Combine that with the fathers’ natural inability to express their feelings, and you get the picture.
The most shocking stories were about parents who could not feed their kids during the Depression era, so they had to place them with “institutions.” I was hoping to see a happy end to those stories, but there wasn’t one.
I think there are at least two very powerful lessons here:
- We owe our fathers a debt of gratitude
- How did this generation become so materialistic, shallow and vain?
The funny thing is I learned about this book from the Jon Stewart’s show.
On the lighter side of things, if you subscribe to Seth Godin’s idea that “markets are conversations”, this is an interesting book.
The Long Tail postulates that in the “digital economy” the cost of storage is almost nil, so offer a great variety of products and help us find stuff. Chris Andreson profiles such companies and services as eBay, Nextflix, Rhapsody, iTunes, Google as text-book examples of Long Tail practitioners.
