As soon as Adrian and I agreed that Management would be the topic of this issue, I knew that I would share the benefits of Camille Fournier's book, The Manager's Path. It is the most succinct introduction to software engineering management for both managers and the managed out there.
The history of programming language books can be roughly divided in three distinctive eras. The first one stretches from the beginnings of programming to the mid 1970s. Programming books from those times were an often underestimated byproduct of the marketing budget of big companies such as IBM, and inherited the dry approach of most engineering books in the post-war era.
These days, it's hard to appreciate that Object-Oriented Programming is so easy, it was taught to kids in junior high before it was ever taught to adults. As supposedly senior software engineers debate whether a Car truly "is a" Vehicle, and whether it wouldn't be easier to learn lambda calculus and determine the median monad blog post than to reflect the real objects in the real-world problem they're solving in their software, it seems reasonable to ask: is it really so difficult?
From October 24th to 29th, 1927, twenty-nine scientists gathered in Brussels for the fifth Solvay Conference. Among the attendees, of which seventeen got a Nobel Prize before or after attending, were Erwin Schrödinger, Wolfgang Pauli, Werner Heisenberg, Paul Dirac, Louis de Broglie, Max Born, Niels Bohr, Max Planck, Marie Curie, Hendrik Lorentz, and Albert Einstein. One might think there might have not been such an assembly of brilliant thinkers since the Platonic Academy.
Many developers will have heard of Barbara Liskov, through her appearance in Robert C. Martin's SOLID list of design principles. The abstract of her 1994 paper with Jeanette Wing, A Behavioral Notion of Subtyping, makes the principle sound easy in, well, in principle.
We need to talk about work. "Work? What’s wrong with work?" you may ask. You would be right to do so. A couple of years back, I might have asked the same thing. From the outside, nothing is wrong with the world of work, nor the workplace. Especially in the tech industry, right? Most of us get pretty good perks and we no longer have to spend 40 years of our life fiddling around for 12 hours a day on a production line like our elders. Metaphorically speaking, of course…
An exclusive interview with Sheree Atcheson, an award-winning Diversity and Inclusion leader. She spends her time helping organisations create inclusive environments which embrace people of all walks of life. She currently works at Deloitte UK as the Tech Respect & Inclusion Manager, at Women Who Code as a Board-Appointed Global Ambassador, and as a Contributor at Forbes.
The only constant is change… and the hiring process. The way companies design their hiring process has always kept my attention. But during the last couple of years, with the increasing discussions and researches about inclusion and diversity, this became even more special. We are walking through a new and super interesting paradigm, but still in beta version.
I personally find it diminishing to be invited to a conference, hired at a company, and generally being treated differently because of my gender. This is something I cannot control, unlike my education, my experience or my attitude towards other people. If what everybody is looking for is to be considered the same as anyone else, shouldn't we look at these values that any human being can actually influence?
When we think of Programming we might think of the creative process. We all know that, we will conclude here that programming is in some way both artful and scientific. Is there ever any doubt about it? In my book the proportion of what is science and what is art has shifted over the years, but let us take a closer look.