Programmers at Work by Susan Lammers

Aunque este es un libro un poco antiguo. Tenía muchas ganas de leerlo por recomendación de un amigo. Fue la inspiración de un libro más moderno que leímos hace tiempo “Coders at Work”. Aquí mi reseña.

En Programmers at Work, Susan entrevista a los más destacados programadores y creadores de la industria del software, especialmente antes de los 90s. Podemos ver personas de importantes empresas y/o software de renombre a nivel mundial como Bill Gates (Microsoft), Toru Iwatani (Pac Man), Michael Hawley (Lucasfilm), Andy Hertzfeld (Mac OS), Jonathan Sachs (Lotus), entre otros.

Un manjar de entrevistas donde hablan de su forma de trabajo, sus pasiones, su educación, sus fracasos, sus éxitos. Es increíble como mucho de los consejos y conceptos de los que hablan son totalmente aplicables a día de hoy.

Just for Fun by Linus Torvalds

Si me preguntaran ¿a quién te gustaría en conocer en persona? En el lugar número 1, seguro estará Linus Torvalds, el creador del Kernel de Linux, genio de genios. Aparte de ser una mente brillante, Linus es una de las personas que más ha contribuido al desarrollo de la Computación e Internet en los últimos tiempos. El sistema operativo Linux se ejecuta en la mayoría de servidores a nivel mundial, los grandes laboratorios, centros de investigación y super computadores usan Linux exclusivamente.

En Just for Fun, Linus, habla de los inicios de la creación de Linux, de como es el trabajo colaborativo entre miles de desarrolladores, de la gigante comunidad de código abierto y como fue y es ser el líder de tantos creadores de software.

Lo que más me gusta de Linus, a parte de su gran capacidad técnica, es el gran sentido del humor que tiene para contar las historias y por supuesto, su infinita ironía, me identifico mucho con ello.

Coders at Work by Peter Seibel

Today, I finished reading the book Coders at Work by Peter Seibel and I found it really enjoyable. Coders at work is a series of interviews with great programmers and computer scientists. If you are somehow a technical person, needs some inspiration or just aspire to be better, I highly recommend you the book.

You will find information about their careers, their thoughts on the software profession and industry and how they consider programming. Programming is art, craftsmanship, science or engineering?.

They also talked about code readability, debugging strategies, testing, language design, job interviews, computer science books worth reading, teamwork, problems at work, how they got into programming and even hobbies.

Here is the list of the fifteen people interviewed. I summarized their main contributions and creations…

Joel on Software

Joel Spolsky is a famous blogger in the software world. He’s an ex-Microsoft employee who worked in the Excel team, is the Co-Founder of Fog Creek, a software company with a great culture and successful products like Trello, FofBugz, Copilot, CityDesk… By the way, the Fog Creek culture is really simple and is summarized like this:

Best Working Conditions -> Best Programmers -> Best Software -> Profit

It’s really funny (Life is to too short, we have to laugh and smile), how some managers still don’t understand this and make the programmers job really painful. Wake up! Wake up! managers.

Joel started writing articles in 2000 and has influenced the way of thinking of many people around the globe. Although, he’s not very active today, he has written really great articles about Software Development, Programming, Design, Startups, Recruiting and Interviews.

If you are a Software Developer, CEO, Team Leader, Product Manager, Startup founder, CS student or just work in the Software Industry, I think you will find these articles really interesting.

You can find all those articles in his blog or you can buy the two books with his writings in Amazon. I really enjoy reading in a tablet too. So, instead of buying the two books, I downloaded the Joel on Software Android app, created by the software company Digicorp. You can use the app, even without an Internet connection. Thanks guys!.

These are my favorite articles, in no particular order:

• The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code.
• Two Stories.
• Painless Bug Tracking.
• Craftsmanship.
• A Field Guide to Developers.
• Finding great developers.
• Fire and Motion.
• The Guerrilla guide to interviewing v_3.0.
• Getting Things Done When You’re Only a Grunt.
• The Command and Control Management Method.
• Top Five (Wrong) Reasons You Don’t Have Testers.
• The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!).

Go and read, buy or download the Joel on Software stuff, it’s worth reading.