Talks You Should Watch and Articles You Should Read

On October 1st, I started a new job with TeamQuest. In conversations about Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, Kanban, DevOps, unit testing, and all those things I get excited about, I keep referencing talks and articles. We nerds can’t communicate anything without dropping quotes of movies and TV shows, so goes my professional talk. Basically, this is my bibliography so if you talk to me you won’t think I’m just making stuff up.

Preventing a dozen one-off e-mails, I list below what has occurred to me to share in my first two weeks.

Design

• How To Design A Good API And Why It Matters by Joshua Bloch
  • If someone ever tells you you’re doing interfaces wrong, consult this (names matter!)
• Simple Made Easy by Rich Hickey
  • The author of Clojure has spent an enormous time thinking (and pontificating) about elegant design. This talk from Strange Loop 2011 explains some great patterns for what you should be doing before you start writing code.

Agile and Kanban

• The five six layers of planning
  • I thought it was five. But the notion of how the different levels of planning can keep you focused on delivering what’s really needed
• Renovate Your Retrospectives by Adam England
  • this guy got me really excited about retros, he recognizes they’re one of the most, if not the most, important ceremonies of Agile

CI / CD / DevOps

• Adopting Continuous Delivery by Jez Humble
  • For one, this guy is my hero. But the talk is fantastic, too. It’s jarring how much these cute metaphors remind you of what happens in the real word, at your company. It’s like reading …
• The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim et al.
  • A novel, telling the story of a fictional company that goes through a transition to DevOps. It’d be funny, if it wasn’t so realistic.

Time Management

• Getting Things Done So You Can Write More Code by Dane Hammer
  • Yes, I’m linking to my own talk. Not because it’s great (it is), but because it covers three things I want to share
    1. the eisenhower method
       • a lightweight meta-todo list method
    2. maker’s schedule, manager’s schedule by Paul Graham
       • a.k.a. M&M’s, meetings and managers, a short article on this perpetual struggle
    3. Getting Things Done (GTD) by David Allen
       • a more heavyweight time management methodology
• Essentialism by Greg McKown
  • A fantastic book about maximizing your contribution, by focusing on what’s the most important to you

My Favorite Talk Ever

Not quite about programming, but more about the impact and heritage of programmers:

To the Moon! from Russ Olsen.