Agile solutions work best when your team needs features like collaboration, flexibility, and feedback. Picking an approach like Scrum should be driven by business needs, not by falling in love with buzzwords. Johanna Rothman (@jrothman) explores Agile project success:
Johanna’s books explore practical ways to lead innovative organizations. If you like this article, make sure to check out all her books with The Pragmatic Bookshelf. Use the discount code from the article to save on your purchase:
Indulge yourself in a celebration of the Rust programming language with this compendium of Medium articles and PragProg books. @Margaret has put together a wonderful collection of All Things Rust for your reading pleasure:
Today, Michael Fazio (@mfazio23), author of Kotlin and Android Development featuring Jetpack, explores the world of Mobile Development in 2021. Developers can choose from native, cross-platform, and web development to deploy apps and reach their customer base – and there are tangible trade-offs for each:
If you enjoy this Medium post, and you want to learn more about Kotlin and Mobile dev, we’ve embedded a nice promo code for you to use when purchasing the ebook version of Kotlin and Android Development featuring Jetpack:
Kotlin and Android Development featuring Jetpack is in print and available from your favorite independent booksellers.
Today, Ken Kousen (@kenkousen) explains why you need to respect the chain of command. Appealing a decision to your manager’s boss will almost certainly damage the loyalty relationship you’ve built between yourself and your manager.
Ken’s book, Help Your Boss Help You, has been the Number 1 Hot New Release on Amazon for Business Ethics and Business Communication several times. It’s full of advice for more productive habits when dealing with your manager.
Johanna Rothman (@jrothman) explains why “going agile” isn’t always the right answer. Integrating agile-influenced approaches and tweaking project lifecycles may offer better solutions to take incremental and culture changes into account.
Many people write about keeping developers productive but what about keeping Software Engineering Managers productive? What tools and strategies help focus and organize a manager’s day? New managers are surrounded by chaos: Slack messages, face-to-face interruptions, meetings, etc. James Stanier (@jstanier) writes how creating an effective process and using the right tools will help:
Become an Effective Software Engineering Manager offers ways to navigate your career into management. Going from engineer to manager doesn’t have to be intimidating. Engineers can be managers, and fantastic ones at that. Cast aside the rhetoric and focus on practical, hands-on techniques and tools. You’ll become an effective and supportive team leader that your staff will look up to. You’ll find a promo code in James’ Medium article for this book:
Now in Print. Order the print version of Become an Effective Software Engineering Manager from your independent bookseller.
Today, Dmitri Sotnikov (@Dmitri) explores why Clojure provides a particularly good match to his personal programming style. It’s not just another language in his toolbox. Rather, Clojure’s power and simplicity means Dmitri can get projects up and running fast enough while the initial spark of excitement is still present.
If you want to learn more about Clojure, the third edition of Web Development with Clojure by Dmitri and Scot Brown teaches you to master the language by building a series of web apps of increasing size and scope, allowing you to discover important techniques along the way. We’ve embedded a generous promo code into the Medium article for the PragProg ebook:
Also in print, available from your favorite independent booksellers.
Functional programming enables you to transform data through pure functions, without the need for state or side effects. Today, Dmitri Sotnikov (@Dmitri) explores some of the advantages of data-oriented programming in his Medium article versus using an object-oriented approach:
If you want to learn more about Clojure, the third edition of Web Development with Clojure by Dmitri and Scot Brown teaches you to master the language by building a series of web apps of increasing size and scope, allowing you to discover important techniques along the way. We’ve embedded a generous promo code into the Medium article for the PragProg ebook:
Also in print, available from your favorite independent booksellers.
Today, Johanna Rothman (@jrothman) dives into Iterative Lifecycles. Learn about the Spiral Life Cycle, that uses as many iterations as needed to prototype and Evolutionary Prototyping, where the focus is on growing the concept apart from specific requirements.
Johanna Rothman’s books focus on innovative and creative ways to hire and manage talent in the workplace. Use the promo code embedded in the Medium article to treat yourself to her library of Pragmatic Bookshelf ebook offerings.
There are more jobs on the market than there are talented candidates actively looking to fill them. Today, James Stanier (@jstanier) explores how you attract the right employees to your organization in his write-up on Medium:
You can read more about hiring and firing, performance and salary reviews, and building a great team in James’ Become an Effective Software Engineering Manager. We’ve tucked away a generous promo code in the Medium article for you to use when purchasing the eBook from PragProg:
If you prefer print, Become an Effective Software Engineering Manager is available now from your favorite booksellers.
The Bevy Engine is a free, open-source, data-driven game engine built in Rust. Today, Herbert Wolverson (@herbert) gives it a try-out to build a Space Invaders game. At release 0.5, is it still worth giving it a try in your own project? There’s a lot of great features. Herbert explores the trade-offs:
You can read more about working with Rust to build games in Herbert’s Hands-on Rust. Each chapter in this book presents hands-on, practical projects ranging from “Hello, World” to building a full dungeon crawler game. Plus, the article contains a limited time promo code so you can snap up a copy of the eBook with a nice discount!
Order the print version of Hands-on Rust by Herbert Wolverson from your favorite independent bookseller.
Eventually, all in-print books are available to read on Medium with a subscription. It takes us a few months after the book is in print to make it available there.
Hugo is a static site generator written in Go. Today, Brian P Hogan (@bphogan) explores ways to use Hugo to display shell command code blocks for code-heavy sites. Should you show a shell prompt? Should you not? Brian delves into systematizing your process:
You can find a lot more about using Hugo in Brian P Hogan’s Build Websites with Hugo. His book shows you how to design layouts with HTML and share common components across pages. It explores consuming and generating JSON, enhancing layouts, and generating sites that work across platforms without dependencies or databases. We’ve tucked away a generous promo coupon for you in the Medium article if you’d like to pick up a copy of the ebook:
If you’d prefer to purchase the paperback, Build Websites with Hugo is also available from your favorite independent booksellers.
Today Johanna Rothman (@jrothman) discusses incremental lifecycles. Rather than iterating towards a single release, teams release measurable increments of value, with multiple deliveries throughout a project. This opens the door to feedback that can allows one feature set to help shape the next.
Johanna’s books explore practical ways to lead innovative organizations. If you like this article, make sure to check out all her books with The Pragmatic Bookshelf. Use the discount code from the article to save on your eBook purchase direct from PragProg:
Today, James Stanier (@jstanier) explores the interview process from the point of view of the recruiting party. A good interview will assess tech skills, team fit, and overall suitability for the role. James explores how to structure interviews to quickly identify these characteristics.
Going from engineer to manager doesn’t have to be intimidating. Engineers can be managers, and fantastic ones at that. Cast aside the rhetoric and focus on practical, hands-on techniques and tools. James Stanier’s Become an Effective Software Engineering Manager helps you gain the tools to become an effective and supportive team leader that your staff will look up to. The Medium article includes a generous promo code for purchasing the ebook:
If you’d rather purchase a paperback, it’s in print now and available from your favorite independent booksellers.
Today, Ken Kousen (@kenkousen) explores how you build a relationship with your manager based on constructive loyalty. In his Medium post, Ken explains how you commit to performing your job and your manager commits to guiding and protecting you:
Want to know more? Pick up Ken’s book, Help Your Boss Help You, for practical advice on how to make the complex relationship of manager/employee work. Learn how to convert conflicts into opportunities. You’ll find a generous promo code in Ken’s Medium article for purchasing the ebook:
Prefer a paperback? Help Your Boss Help You is in print from your favorite independent booksellers.
Weekly 1 to 1s enable you to engage with each of your staff on a deep, personal level. Today, James Stanier (@jstanier) writes about how performing 1 to 1s well requires consistent focus:
Become an Effective Software Engineering Manager offers ways to navigate your career into management. Going from engineer to manager doesn’t have to be intimidating. Engineers can be managers, and fantastic ones at that. Cast aside the rhetoric and focus on practical, hands-on techniques and tools. You’ll become an effective and supportive team leader that your staff will look up to. You’ll find a promo code in James’ Medium article for this book:
Now in Print. Order the print version of Become an Effective Software Engineering Manager from your independent bookseller.
Today, Miki Tebeka (@tebeka) explores Python “short circuiting”, where the language evaluates only as much of a logic statement as is needed to determine whether it evaluates to true or false. Read about the uses of this important language feature on Medium: (This may look like the wrong link but it is really the right one. It goes to Medium and not Github Gist!)
Miki’s Brain Teasers series is a wonderful way for experienced programmers to challenge their assumptions and better learn the quirks and gotchas of the languages they use. The Medium article contains a generous promo code that you can use when purchasing these ebooks:
Today, Eric Redmond explores the complex landscape of AI in this archival post from PragPub magazine. His article targets those who have passively consumed press about Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Deep Neural Networks, and the like over the past couple years.
