Oct 18, 2023

Tidy first? Software design by Kent Beck

The book kicks off by delving into "tydings", which can be thought of as a specialized form of refactoring, focused on a specific area and not heavily reliant on presenting concrete code. The crucial aspect is grasping the underlying concept. In the second section, Beck shifts towards a more professional...

Jan 20, 2023

Navigating Challenging Dialogues: A Thoughtful Review of 'Difficult Conversations'

Difficult conversations is a book that anyone at any stage of their life could read, this is not just a book about leadership or management, it goes a step further into the relationships that we have. Relationships that require difficult conversations, be it with your children, your boss, your parents...

Oct 31, 2022

Escape velocity, better metrics for agile teams - Review (Lead time, Delivery frequency, Cycle time, Cumulative Flow Diagram, Code quality, Team joy and Forecasting)

As opinionated as it can be Escape Velocity gives some insights on metrics that can be used in "agile" (whatever agile means in a given context) teams. From the start, a distinction is made between velocity and value. On one hand, the way the author depicts the chasing for speed...

Aug 9, 2022

Measure what matters (OKRs) - The Simple Idea that Drives 10x Growth - Review

OKRs (Objective-Key-Results) are a powerful tool for aligning and focusing your team on the most important goals. But they're not easy to implement. In his book, Measure What Matters, John Doerr shares success stories from different businesses that have used OKRs to achieve great results.

Jun 22, 2022

Strategic monoliths and microservices - Driving Innovation Using Purposeful Architecture - Book review and takeaways

Microservices have gotten attention in the industry since its inception. The idea of having independent deployment, scalable services, and rapid interaction was quickly spread across developers and among decision takers in the software community. Therefore, such advantages took more attention than its counterparts, leading to the microservices hype and later...

Jan 6, 2022

Impact mapping - review

Building software is hard, building software that users love and actually deliver value is even harder. For long, the software industry suffered (and still suffers) for lack of communication between technicians and business, leading to different approaches of how to get them on the same page and build. Even with...

Nov 13, 2021

The Cognitive Code Vault: Exploring Memory and the Programmer's Brain

The programmer's brain is one of the best books I've read in 2021. I would say that for me, it opened up a different perspective on reading, writing and understanding code. I already wrote some lines around the process of learning and how it is a subject that interests me,...

Nov 11, 2021

Migrating to microservices databases by Edson Yanaga - Migration and technical challenges

Microservices are a popular subject among developers and business, the idea of scaling and moving different streams of work forward at the same time shines in the eyes. Therefore, with the shift of how we architect applications, the challenges and tread offs should be carefully analyzed. I personally like books...

Oct 4, 2021

Cultivating Quality Code - A Comprehensive Review and Notes on 'Growing Object-Oriented Software Guided by Tests'

Test-driven development has been a subject of interest on this blog for a few years now and the first pot to come around was the classic book from Kent Beck Test Drive Development by example. More recently I also wrote on my TDD journey as I was trying to focus...

Jul 27, 2021

Delving into Extreme Programming: An In-depth Review of 'Extreme Programming Explained' (2nd Edition)

Extreme Programming (XP) is a dynamic software development methodology that places equal importance on both technical prowess and collaborative dynamics within a team. It hinges on two fundamental pillars - adaptability to change and the pursuit of technical excellence, which provides teams the agility they need. On the other hand,...

Jun 19, 2021

Driving Organizational Excellence: A Comprehensive Book Review and Personal Insights on 'Accelerate - Building and Scaling High-Performing Technology Organizations'

Delivering software fast and keeping quality is challenging (Dave Farley challenges the potential tread-off between speed and quality, elaborating on the argument that the one depends on the other, instead of the one blocks the other). Accelerate brings the light through data on the DevOps culture and practices. DevOps (even...

Oct 26, 2020

Production-Ready microservices - Book review and my personal notes

Microservices are a trend that is growing even more, recently I read the book "Production-Ready microservices" from Susan J. Fowler and it gave me insights on how to prepare or at least to have a guide to go through when developing in a microservices oriented architecture. Susan says in the...

Aug 23, 2020

Clean code and the art of readable code a summary

Readable code is a subject of discussion among developers aiming to improve their code skills and also thinking about the human side of the code, indeed, the machine executes the code and doesn't care about the readability or maintainability of the code, instead, this chore, is part of the daily...

Aug 10, 2020

Mastering the Art of Learning: A Comprehensive Course Overview and Notes on 'Learning How to Learn'

Learning how to learn is a course made by Barbara Oakley and Dr. Terrence Senowski published by Coursera, which aims to give people an understanding in how we as humans learn. The course is science based and dives on how we can benefit of knowing how our brain works, to...

Nov 3, 2015

Continuous Delivery - Foundation, Configuration Management, Continuous Integration, Implementing a test strategy, build and deployment scripting, the commit stage

As we know the software nowadays exists to support the business rules and I believe that it is a huge problem to programmers as well as everyone involved with software development. As the business grows, the software might change as well but change isn't the problem, it is the frequency....

Apr 4, 2015

The definitive guide to HTML5 WebSocket

The book "The definitive guide to HTML5 WebSocket" is a short book with a great content, if you are looking for web sockets this book is a good start. I would like to highlight three sections of the book that I recommend a second read.

Feb 20, 2015

Design Patterns Made Easy - A Review of Head First Design Patterns Head first

You can find the source code in the already but also you can have a look at the github and learn a bit more about the book content. If you want to order a copy for you go ahead and visit O Reilly website.

Jan 26, 2015

TDD by example

TDD by example is a perfect book if you are looking for the first step into the TDD world. I would say the book was divided into two main parts, the first one is how does the TDD works and how to do your own tests using a simple abstraction,...

Jan 22, 2015

The Art of Readable Code

Have you ever wonder what was the best comment to write? Have you ever had to read twice the same code to understand what that was about? Don't worry this book is for you!