Book Review: The Productive Programmer

An intersting book The Productive Programmer by Neal Ford has some great tips for the everyday and really brings out interesting concepts about the daily tasks of programming, as well as some good advice such as "Don't Shave Yaks"(where you can delve so far into a problem you end up solving everything but the problem) and YAGNI (You Ain't Gonna Need It).

The book focuses on useful tips, but really emphasizes reflecting on the kinds of stuff you do. If you begin to see ways of doing something better, you will look for it all around you. Things like, if you always have to navigate to the same directory over and over again, create a shortcut. If you open up the same files every morning, use an accelerator or automate that to do it for you. If you have to send the same email report every week, automate that too.

Probably my favorite idea from the book is "search trumps navigation". Anytime you have to find something, you waste both brain power and time when you have to look through folders or files to find the one you need. Instead, use tools to find what you need. For my Visual Studio friends, I always use ">of myFileName" in the search bar to get the name of the file (this quickly became the most popular way of searching to those I introduced it to at Ganz :P). This is a lot faster than having to search for that class or file through thousands of files. For those on Windows that really miss out on grep (Ford mentions cygwin) but I recommend giving Astrogrep a try http://astrogrep.sourceforge.net/ .It is free open source, allows regular expressions and displays the contents of the file (you will never go back to Windows Explorer for searching again).

Ford also focuses on aspects of eliminating distractions: turning off popup messages, using rooted views for a directory, and automating everything that usefully can be (interaction with websites, spreadsheets, rss feeds, build machines etc.). The later chapters focus on more code examples such as test driven development, source code analysis, as well as some philosophy and psychology applied to coding.

All and all a good book especially for the ideas it will bring about of how to improve your own productivity.

Best of luck,
Michael Hubbard
http://michaelhubbard.ca

RateMyEmployer.ca

In case you did not know there is the site for rating employers: http://www.ratemyemployer.ca/ But how useful is it really for you as a potential employee? Well, from what I can tell, most of the time the ratings are generally pretty negative. This has to be taken in context, and a company that has a lot of employees but not a lot of ratings may potentially be a decent company, while a smaller company that does not have a lot of employees but a lot of negative ratings may not be very good. If you are lucky you will have a lot of comments and will be given reasons for why they were rated that way, either positive or negative. Having only one comment (positive or negative) is usually not enough information to accurately assess whether or not it was just one happy or one angry employee posting from a good or bad day.

For those of you still in school also check out http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/

Regardless, if you are really interested, it never hurts to do a little research. If you are scoping out a new job, try and check it out before you apply. See if the people are happy working there (if you can ask them), check and see if people flood out at 5:00, if there are a lot of fancy cars in the parking lot, if people are smiling or are walking zombies. What kind of stuff has the company produced, do they have a good track record of many successful products, or are they struggling? Another good indication is how much activity (new and leaving) does a company get on Linked In ? Do they have a lot of turn around, and what kind of people are they bringing in (experienced, or fresh out of school)?

It never hurts to do your homework, after all, it is your life.

Best of luck,
Michael Hubbard
http://michaelhubbard.ca