A major project I’ve been working on for the last ten months has just gone live, giving me some time recently to take stock, do a bit of R&D, and catch up on some reading. I’ve been reflecting on how to approach things better in the future, and to this end, I’ve just finished two very different books about the software development process.
O’Reilly’s Extreme Programming Pocket Guide is a handy little summary of the approach (only 81 pages), depicting a near-utopian development shop where everyone is happy, and projects come in under budget and on time. It got me quite fired up, actually, and some of the concepts described are interesting. But deep down, I just know this would never happen in the real world—too much politics, too many personalities at play in the workplace, in my humble opinion.
This is where the second book I read this week comes in. The Career Programmer: Guerrilla Tactics for an Imperfect World provides useful suggestions for dealing with the aforementioned politics and personalities in pursuit of spending more time happily coding while developing your skills and career.
Both books are well worth reading for any professional coder, as together they offer a wealth of practical advice on making a developer’s life less stressful.