Reading about Development

We had a new developer start about three months ago, and they've been a great hire. Meanwhile, I sat down to chat with them the other day, and they voiced the concern that the rest of the development team felt so much farther ahead than them, they weren't sure if they were doing a good job or not.

Three quick solutions to this one:

1. At our regular check-ins, I ask the new dev to evaluate themself, so I have a better idea of how they feel things are going.
   
2. I've suggested two books to read, if they were interested, with the explicit instruction they're allowed to skip them both.
   

A bachelor's degree doesn't give you experience, and often misses on a lot of topics that are incredibly useful to a web developer. A degree in computer science isn't ever intended to give you all the hands-on skills you'd need to work in any branch of development; I'd argue a software engineering degree, same issues.

That said, the short list of books was:

The Pragmatic Programmer. A terrific, well written guide to writing commercial software. I'd read this one first; it's shorter, and has a more conversational tone to it. It's an easy read, and - rarest of all tech books - it's actually a page turner. Whereas it does give code-level advice, it also advises you not to ask for budget for unpopular (but necessary) projects on Friday afternoons when it's raining.


Code Complete. A more in depth guide to writing better code. Instead of writing code to just accomplish a business goal, it gets you thinking about design, from class architecture to design patterns all the way down to whitespace.

Education

Rejoined the ACM today, mostly for the online content; it's pretty damn good, actually. The trophy take away today was something by Bjarne Stroustup, creator of C++. Not sure of posting fulltext and/or excerpts from the ACM; I need to find out their use policy. Assuming no to the first, and yes to the latter.

""Education should prepare people to face new challenges; that's what makes education different from training."

Never really considered that before, but it's spot on the difference between vocational training and academics; the academics are usually more theoretical, which gives you a wider reach of what you *can* do, but less ability to sit down and immediately *do* anything, unless you've also self-trained on the side.

This came up in an argument against someone being incredulous that computer science degrees don't teach revision control systems, which lead me to think, well, should they? It's vocational, and not theory; it'd be like teaching an IDE. They're really useful skills in "real world" corporate jobs, but they're not computer science theory, by a longshot. They're the things you pick up along the way in college to get the college work done. Then again, having a school-sponsored revision control repository would have taken a lot of stress out of losing a floppy disk here or there.

It's always seemed that if you can find someone with background in theory who enjoys doing hands on work, you've won the recruiting game. That said, the background in theory doesn't have to be academic, and the hands-on-work doesn't have to be outside of academia, either. Thoughts?

Apple Headphones Snafu, iTunes U

I have an iPhone, given as a gift to me around Christmas. I had quite a few gripes where I felt let down by it, and will probably move back to a much less featured phone when this one gives up the ghost.

So, a friend had an iPod Shuffle. They lost it for a few weeks - the thing is really, really tiny. They bought a new one. A few weeks later, they found the old one, and decided to give it to me, as I can use it when I go running.

After figuring out the cord had gone bad, I ordered a 3rd party one ($5 on Amazon, instead of $25 to Apple). That worked, and after loading it up with songs... nothing. Some quick trial and error later, I realized the Apple iPhone headset doesn't work at all with the iPod Shuffle, but plain headphones work just fine.

It's a minor frustration, but seems a design flaw; the iPhone headphones are pretty darn standard. Other than that, the Shuffle works as promised.

Scrolling through iTunes, it looks like they recently added iTunes U, which is an aggregation point for free educational podcasts. Of interest is MIT's Algorithms course, based on CLRS, which always seemed more learner-friendly than Knuth's books. For those playing along at home, Knuth's books (starting in 1968) are the original authoritative text on the subject, but much slower going for the student, IMHO. Also good, CMU has put up Randy Pauch's speeches, both the Last Lecture and the Personal Productivity.