25 posts tagged with "books"

Manager-dom was not a sought-after status (though I admit to prior curiosity), but as with many other engineers-turned-managers, it found me anyway (Q3 2023). Being a team lead and then an architect came naturally and brought success for many years. Some of the skills translate well from those roles while other necessary capabilities tend to be underdeveloped. Nothing can truly substitute for the value of gaining experience and reflecting on it; here are a few resources that I have found useful in my journey so far, giving me new ideas to play with and questions to aid my reflection.

More than merely a memoir, Portals to Freedom by Howard Colby Ives is both a loving portrait of a "holy man" and a deeply personal exploration of the slow convergence between intellectualism and spirituality. Ives, a former Unitarian minister, wrote Portals to Freedom nearly eighty years ago. His aim was to recount his experiences, still vivid 25 years after the fact, of sitting "at the feet of the master" in a nearly literal sense — that is, of spending time in the company of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, head of the Bahá’í Faith from his father’s death in 1892 until his own in 1921. In various cultural terms, you might call him a holy man, a guru, a saint; Bahá’is simply call him "the Master."

Love God Heal Earth is a compilation of essays, from leaders of 11 religions and denominations, that delve into the religious call for a transition to a sustainable way of life. While not devoid of science, this book presents a deeply spiritual, personal, and hopeful message that moves beyond the intellectual reality of global climate change. In other words, it is a powerful complement to the grim facts of An Inconvenient Truth.

In this scholarly work, Janet and Peter Khan present the theological grounding, social context, historical action, and modern implementation of the concept of "equality between the sexes" as found in the Bahá'í Faith. Well researched and clearly written, the book has much to offer to those who, from any background, wish to better understand the underpinnings and the implications of this critical spiritual principle.

What books leave you feeling misanthropic? And what books lift your spirit, restoring a sense of faith in humanity? In this household we are currently reading Crime and Punishment and Mockingjay, which, in some unremembered way, triggered this discussion. Reviewing the many books we have read in common, we came up with a short list of those at the pinnacle for us. We ruled out anything too obvious, e.g. no dystopian novels, and no… well, I guess we don't even know about novels that are deliberately or obviously uplifting. I presume they exist, but I couldn't tell you the name of one.

Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests by Steve Freeman and Nat Pryce

I did not realize how much I still have to learn about writing good object-oriented (OO) code, and about hewing to a tight test driven development (TDD) methodology, before I read Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided By Tests. My education in OO and unit testing has been largely theoretical, with no time spent directly learning from experienced OO programmers; my best mentor was a COBOL coder. Books like Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software ("Gang of Four"), Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture, Applying UML and Patterns: An Introduction to Object-Oriented Analysis and Design and Iterative Development, Xunit Test Patterns: Refactoring Test Code, and others are wonderful but have few detailed real-world business-case examples.

"The best way to attack the essence of building software," Dr. Brooks writes, "is not to build it at all." (p222). With this he introduces a brief discussion of the importance of code reuse, and of its challenges.

In the chapter titled "Plan the System for Change," Dr. Brooks again lays out the foundations for Agile software development. His was an era of dumb-terminals and highly scheduled availability. And yet, here he is saying, "plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow." When RAM wasn't cheap, and good programmers even more rare than today, how does a project manager or architect justify throwing out the first design on purpose? By recognizing that "[t]he only question is whether to plan in advance to build a throwaway, or to promise to deliver the throwaway to customers."

Overclocked, Stories of the Future Present, is worth buying. But you don't have to, thanks to the fact that Doctorow made it available under a Creative Commons license, and you can download it for free. These are incredible short stories, standing up with the best of Bradbury and Gaiman (my favorite short story authors). When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth was gut-wrenching, at least for this former sysadmin. I, Row Boat manages to beguile and frighten you at the same time. What's more frightening than an angry, conscious, coral reef? Pared up with a row boat working through existentialism? Print Crime is a beautiful call to the indomitability of the human spirit, and Anda's Game is all kinds of biting and insightful commentary wrapped up in the thrill of virtual victory. I, Robot and After the Seige round out the brilliant set of stories.

Many of the recommendations Dr. Brooks makes in this work can seem outdated at first glance; however, it does not take much to bring them into today's software development environments. Take the telephone log for example:

"One useful mechanism is a telephone log kept by the architect. In it he records every question and every answer. Each week the logs of the several architects are concatenated, reproduced, and distributed to the users and implementers. While this mechanism is quite informal, it is both quick and comprehensive." (p69)