Osvaldo Santana Neto
I read this book a long time ago and really loved it. It was my first Asimov book.
Reading it for the second time after a long time was not so impactful as it was in the past.
It's a simple book with simple premisses and not so profound discussions about the impact of AI and robots could have on our capitalist society.
Fabien Sanglard is my comfort reading. Every time I feel stressed or strugled with my working life I recur to his books (or blog posts).
His writing is fluid, objective and detailed enough to open the gates of my curiosity about the things he writes about.
At the same time it brings me memoriea frim a time where programming used to be a form of art that enables creativity.
The book started really well, in the beginning, explaining ideas and concepts of the capitalism.
After that I become really frustrated with the “hacking” part of the book.
I expected that she would explain how to “hack” the capitalism in a way to overcome it but she gave hints and tips to “surf” the capitalism and grow/survive inside of it.
IMHO, the objective of hacking something is to exploit it (break it, destroy it, expose it, ...) not “live it”.
After a long time, I finally finished reading the book “Designing Data-Intensive Applications.” The book is phenomenal. Certainly one of the best things I've read recently.
The book takes a tour through the world of database systems, streaming, distributed systems, system architecture, etc. And it ends on a high note by addressing ethical issues in data management.
I read this book for the first time around 15 years ago. At that time, I was younger and naive and this book revealed many topics that I never thought about.
Now, with more experience as a developer and manager, I decided to re-read it, and it brings a small dose of disappointment. But don't get me wrong: It is still a wonderful/required book for everyone involved with software: software developers, tech/product/project managers.
The main issue that I can see is that the book did not age well and the references for deprecated/outdated technologies and processes deviate the attention of the foundations of the book:
1. The mythical man-month
2. No Silver Bullet
3. The second-system effect
4. Conceptual Integrity (this one is important!)
... and so on.
Recently, I started a treatment for anxiety. Some therapy, some medicine... no results. Then I accidentally found this book at the bookstore and it completely blew my mind.
Anna Lembke explains about the dopamine addiction that modern society is facing and gives some recommendations about how to manage this.
She tries to go further on the causes of the society's addictiveness to Dopamine but, unfortunately, she does not go far enough on the root cause: capitalism. It is impossible to survive in a society under capitalism where everything is created to be sold, even the promise of happiness and well-being.
A small book full of dense considerations about software design at the individual (developer) level.
I love the way Kent Beck always describes complex topics with the perfect examples in a direct and objective way.
This style of writing makes his books easy and fast reading.
This is the first part of a series of books about software design. I will be anxiously waiting for the next.
It was one of the hardest book to go through for an ADHD reader like me. It is not a bad book but it's completely misaligned with my expectations and taste.
I was expecting a deeper and technical exploration about the history of the computer manufacturer Data General on the development of their Eclipse 32-bit computer but I got a book that looks more like a “New Journalism” magazine feature.
In the matter of taste, when I read a magazine feature I prefer the standard news writing style with more facts and less adjectives.
The book is a collection of essays with different level of quality. Some chapters are amazing but most of them only summarize the content of other classic books (all of them are referenced).
The second part of the book shows some interesting pieces of code from different projects.
The fact that the book is not available in ebook format is also a bad thing.
This is that kind of book that you need to read ignoring the author that is not a good human being.
A summary of this book would be: read the Kent Beck's eXtreme Programming Explained and ignore all the Agile bullshit. And I agree with that part.
Some arguments ignores some situations that happens in a real software project (eg. how to handle when some developers leave the team or when we hire a new, not so experienced, developer to work in a already running project?).
There are some chapters written by guests and some of these chapters are pure crap trying to sell “coach certifications” and others are really good like the Craftsmanship chapter.
It is a quick reading and it would be a good book for non-devs understand some aspects of the Agile Software Development.
The book is really short, objective, and good. But it is not perfect (no book is). I think that he missed the opportunity to propose an alternative to the scenario where all these “acronyms” provide some help to developers that are creating solutions for some problems which they really don't have enough knowledge about.
Let me give an example to explain what exactly I'm trying to say.
It's quite common to be hired to create software that solves some problems. But usually, the developer doesn't know exactly how to solve this problem in the best way since from the beginning. He will learn more about the problem and how to solve it in the best way through the process of developing the software.
But we need to start something, and we can rely on some different approaches to start solving this problem:
1. Big Design Up Front: developer starts to study everything that he can learn about the problem and start architecting a definitive solution for it. Pros: good enough solution if everything goes fine. Cons: high risky of failing on the solution. The customer needs to wait for some time until he starts to have the benefit of the solution.
2. “Standard” practices of software engineering like SOLID/DRY/YAGNI/KISS/Agile/etc: you can start creating the solution using an Agile approach and some ‘standard' architecture that enables you with a flexible-enough solution that could be changed between iterations. Pros: “Nobody Gets Fired For Buying IBM”. Lots of developers already know these patterns and practices. Cons: you will get an overengineered solution for the problem just to make it more flexible.
3. Test-Driven Design + Refactoring / Agile: you will be literally guided by the code in the process and change the code (refactor) when needed. Pros: you will learn about the problem in the process and you won't spend time with high complexity on the code. Cons: it's really hard to “teach” this mindset for a young developer or to change the acronym-mindset in an already dogmatized senior developer.
I believe that there are more approaches than that I'm pointing but I never tried them to write something about.
Amazing Book. The preface/first chapters worth the reading of this book. But I believe it could be a little bit repetitive for the readers of Uncle Bob's previous books because he uses the SOLID principles as a tool for architecting the software the same way he proposes that principles to model software components.
If it's your first book about bootstrap/lifestyle business, you will rate this book with five stars. But it was not my case.
This book is kind if a summary of the $100 Startup and ”It doesn't have to be crazy at work.”
The intermediate chapters are painfully repetitive and could be pointed as a “list of companies of one.”
Good parts? The introduction (with references to Ricardo Semler) chapter and the final chapters that gives some essential hints to start a Company of One.
The beginning of this book is barely boring and repetitive. They try to explain the concept of fitness functions in several ways but it's a simple concept: automated testing for for architectural aspects of your systems. You define the main aspects of your system and create automated tests to ensure this characteristics. After 40% of the reading the things becomes more “practical” and authors propose some strategies to implement this kind of tests.
An updated version of the book that adds new developments in computers since the 1st edition. Some chapter was rewritten, and new chapters were added.
The development of a subset of an Intel 8080 processor/computer was expanded and added more complexity to the book. It requires more attention in reading to understand what is happening through the explanation.
The latest chapter tries to go from the computer to the current state of the internet. It forced the author to compress much information into a small part of the book.
So, to summarize, it is still a good book, but I prefer the 1st edition.
I abandoned with 15%. I don't want to spend my time reading YA-liberal book that tries to propose useless ideas to workers without touching the fundamental issues: in the capitalism we, workers, are exploited by the capitalists and they will find ways to do that because they profit making our lives miserable.
Instead of reading this book use your time to read The Communist Manifest (and The Capital if you feel adventurous).
On reading The Communist Manifest you will even save some money because it is already in public domain.
I think the book explain how systems work but avoids to quickly go deeper into the explanation of their dynamics.
It make the book extremely tedious and boring. For this reason I decided to abandon it with 23% of progress.
We need more than just coding skills to become an amazing developer. It is easy to find books to learn how to use some technology or tool but not so easy to find good books that helps to improve our so called “soft skills”. This book is a good starting point to become a better developer.
(I read the book on preprint)