Exploring Extreme Programming
Give People Money, by Annie Lowrey. ISBN 1524758760. 2018. Universal Basic Income (“UBI”) is a system that gives everybody “free” money, say $1000/month. The idea is being considered by people with various goals: providing people with a way out of Continue reading Review: Give People Money
Martin Fowler writes, “Refactoring is the process of changing a software system in such a way that it does not alter the external behavior of the code yet it improves its internal structure.” [Refactoring, 1999, p. xvi] But what does Continue reading Limits of Refactoring: What IS Behavior?
Man of Constant Sorrow: My Life and Times, by Ralph Stanley and Eddie Dean. Avery, 2009. Ralph Stanley was part of the Stanley Brothers until his brother Carter died in the 1960s; then he performed without him for many years. Continue reading Review: Man of Constant Sorrow: My Life and Times (Ralph Stanley)
Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone?: The Carter Family and Their Legacy in American Music, by Mark Zwonitzer with Charles Hirshberg. Simon & Schuster, 2014. The Carter Family was one of the biggest stars of early country music, after Continue reading Review: Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone?: The Carter Family
How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, Crown, 2018. If you’re like me, you assumed that democracy to dictatorship would be some sort of guns-in-the-streets scenarios. Levitsky and Ziblatt argue that it’s not necessarily that way, that often Continue reading Review: How Democracies Die
The vocabulary of your user stories frames the domain of discourse: what are your stories about? It’s helpful to think of “the headline” and “the rest”. “The headline” is what you’d write on an index card or as a title Continue reading User Story Vocabulary: Problem, Solution, or Widget?
Compiler Construction, by Niklaus Wirth. Addison-Wesley, 1996. ISBN 0201403536. I hadn’t run across this before, but I can’t resist calling it out now. It’s a presentation by Niklaus Wirth of how to create a compiler. The source language is a subset Continue reading Review: Compiler Construction (Wirth)
Fire in the Valley: The Birth and Death of the Personal Computer (3/e), by Michael Swaine and Paul Freiberger. 2014. ISBN 1937785769. What was involved in the creation of the personal computer? It was more than just Apple ][ and IBM Continue reading Review: Fire in the Valley, by Swaine and Freiberger
How do you handle delivery of new features or new systems? The easiest way is to just add the new features or replace the existing system, with no transition, but this is not the only approach. We’ll consider several strategies Continue reading Delivery Strategies
We’ll look at two refactorings suitable for conditional statements: Pull Up Common Head of Conditional and Pull Down Common Tail of Conditional. I originally learned these as performance optimizations but they also help simplify and clarify code. In Refactoring, Martin Continue reading Refactoring: Pull Common Code from Conditional