Holiday time is usually a great opportunity to take time for things which didn’t really fit into the passed by year and to pick up things which help me to see beyond my nose. Along with some paper work and some house work there’s quite a list of programming related things I read and tried during the last days. And to give you some inspiration here’s my list:
The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master - a must read for every programmer and once in a while worth to take a look at. It also opens up tons of other topics which you should be pragmatic at.
Why Functional Programming Matters - introducing the concepts of lazy evaluation and high-order functions for a couple of mathematical examples. With Steam.js as implementation of lazy evaluation in JavaScript.
MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters - every now and then I’m trying to get my hands dirty with CouchDB and re-reading this paper and the related works is always a good start.
Some texts worth looking at when it comes to user stories Imperative vs Declarative Scenarios in User Stories, The Easy Way to Writing Good User Stories, A User Story Primer, How do you estimate the Business Value of User Stories? You don’t., Story Smells: The Valueless Story
The training wheels came off - shows how valuable BDD scenarios should look like and why the cucumber-rails (ruby gem) stopped shipping predefined step definitions to enforce better scenarios among newcomers.
What Your Dog Can Teach You About Building Teams - a blog post which has a good point, it misses some background information though. In depth insights might come from Management 3.0: Leading Agile Developers, Developing Agile Leaders and Coaching Agile Teams: A Companion for ScrumMasters, Agile Coaches, and Project Managers which I won’t have time to look into :(
Coding Conway’s Game of Life in Ruby the TDD Way with RSpec #1 - a great screencast showing TDD in action with Ruby and RSpec. This 50min screencast shows how things evolve during TDD coding sessions and how models can grow within test suits.
What’s on your list?