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Posts filed under “Reading”

Code Like You Mean It

Very good presentation by Dan North about »Deliberate Discovery: Code Like You Mean It«. »Ignorance is multivariate« and »We’re ignorant about our ignorance« – yes, based on past project experience, I guess I can confirm that! ;) He also mentions an interesting book called »A mind of its own: How Your Brain Distorts and Deceives«…

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Outstanding Book on Software Development

The average software developer reads less than one job-related book per year. This may be true or may not be true. I have no proof for this claim, I just heard or read it »somewhere«. Making Software: What Really Works, and Why We Believe It does not have an answer either but sheds lights on […]

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How to be a Programmer

»To be a good programmer is difficult and noble. The hardest part of making real a collective vision of a software project is dealing with one’s coworkers and customers.« When a book about programming starts with this software development truth, it’s a good sign that it is worth reading. Robert L Read’s short book »How […]

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Excellent Book on Software Development

Just want to quickly point out an excellent reading for all software developers, architects, team leads or project managers: »Leading Lean Software Development: Results Are not the Point« by Mary and Tom Poppendieck. Although there is a chapter about technical excellence that covers architecture, TDD, evolutionary development etc., you won’t any code in it (a […]

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Demystifying Kanban and Scrum

»Do not develop an attachment to any one weapon or any one school of fighting.« (Miyamoto Musashi) – this is directly cited from a very readable free pdf book by Henrik Kniberg & Mattias Skarin about two popular agile practices: Kanban and Scrum. Not only do the authors compare Kanban and Scrum to each other, […]

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Fundamental Facts about Software Engineering

Interesting article about “Frequently Forgotten Fundamental Facts about Software Engineering” on the IEEE website.

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CommunityCommands: Command Recommendations for Software Applications

Actually, this should be one of my recent “Paper of the Month” posts but I’m not really fond of that title and the structure of my past posts any more. I’m going to keep on presenting new papers, which I find interesting and worthwhile, in a more informal style from now on (in software terms: […]

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Paper of the Month: Faster Cascading Menu Selections Using AAMUs and EMUs

Actually, this post deals with two papers that I want to briefly present here (since they are closely related to each other). Download links and a short introduction below: The papers Tanvir, E., Cullen, J., Irani, P., Cockburn, A. (2008) AAMU: Adaptive Activation Area Menus for Improving Selection in Cascading Pull-Down Menus. Proceedings of ACM […]

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“Flash Engineering” – A book about software engineering with the Flash Platform

Recently, the book “Flash Engineering” by Sven Busse (2009) has been published. While it is currently only available in German, English speakers might still want to read on, since it is quite unique compared to other books relating to that technology. I don’t know if an English version is being planned (if not, it would […]

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Paper of the Month: Rethinking the Progress Bar

This is the second post in my series about worthwhile, freely available academic papers with practical relevance for application design. Here you go: The paper Harrison, C., Amento, B., Kuznetsov, S., Bell, R. (2007) Rethinking the Progress Bar. Proceedings of the 20th Annual ACM Symposium on User interface Software and Technology. Newport, Rhode Island, USA, […]

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