Brian On Software

This is the third post for "This Week’s Geek Links".

Like last time, I’ll start this post by recommending some exceptional and inspiring videos that will challenge you as a professional, but more importantly as a human being.  I hope you’ll enjoy them!

Highly recommended to watch this week

• "The Pleasure Of Finding Things Out".
  Filmed in 1981, this interview by the BBC with the late Richard Feynman will delight and inspire anyone who would like to share something of the joys of scientific discovery. Feynman is a master storyteller, and his tales — about childhood, Los Alamos, or how he won a Nobel Prize — are a vivid and entertaining insight into the mind of a great scientist at work and play. I was curious about this character while listening to an audio version of his extraordinary book "Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!".
• "The Boy With The Incredible Brain".
  This is the breathtaking story of Daniel Tammet. A twenty-something with extraordinary mental abilities, Daniel is one of the world’s few  … all » savants. He can do calculations to 100 decimal places in his head, and learn a language in a week. This documentary follows Daniel as he travels to America to meet the scientists who are convinced he may hold the key to unlocking similar abilities in everyone. He also meets the world’s most famous savant, the man who inspired Dustin Hoffman’s character in the Oscar winning film ‘Rain Man’.

Blog Posts

• "‘Commit’ like your life depends on it"
  Russ Miles, co-author of Head First Software Development, writes about the importance of updating your code base from the source repository before committing your changes.  The "Works On My Machine" syndrome doesn’t work when working in a team.  So if your current repository doesn’t oblige you to update before committing, this article will explain you the why and the how of doing this.  Be sure to read the comments too!
• "Software Consultants Care Too (well, great ones do)"
  In this other post, Russ Miles shares his vision of what is a great consultant and how he differentiates himself from the good consultant.  I really like the following line he wrote: "That’s the real difference.  A good consultant does the job, a great one delivers above and beyond."  I’m currently a consultant and I strongly believe in Russ’s principles: a consultant should care about his work, his professionalism and his client.  A consultant should help his client beyond what the client requested of him in some circumstances.  Great post!
• "At the heart of great software are great people"
  And yet another post from blogger and author Russ Miles.  So far, I’m liking his writings because even though what he’s writing about has been written many times already by other people, it needs to remain constantly on the surface for the newcomers to see.  This principle is about knowing and accepting the fact that people are behind the creation of software.  Not tools, not processes, not technologies.  People.  As he says: "All the techniques we concentrate consider the people involved, because without people you just don’t have any software being written".  Another good post!

Articles

• "Melinda Gates goes public"
  We haven’t seen nor heard much about Bill Gates’ wife in the public eye as of late.  In this article, Fortune Magazine interviews Melinda French Gates, one half of the The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, a world-wide philanthropic organization.  She’s stepping up the public eye for a good two good reasons: to publicly declare war on the world’s deadliest human diseases and to serve as a role model for her children.

Screencasts/Webcasts

• "Examining Why Agile Software Development Works"
  One of my software engineering heroes, Scott Ambler won a Rock Star award for his talk on choosing the right processes over choosing the right technologies.  He also discuses on Scrum, agile change management, database refactoring, database testing, Agile Model Driven Development and agile documentation strategies.  You must register for a free account the Sun Developer Network, but it is worth it!  On a lost note, his talk is geared towards Java technologies, but his principles still apply in .NET!
• "Designing .NET Class Libraries"
  This is by far the best video on sound API design principles with .NET.  Here, Krzysztof Cwalina, PM in the .NET Framework Team at Microsoft Corp., presents best practices for designing frameworks that are reusable object-oriented libraries.  The guidelines are applicable to frameworks ranging in size and in their scale of reuse from large system frameworks to small components shared among several applications. They started as a small set of naming and design conventions, but have been enhanced, scrutinized, and refined to a point where they are generally considered the canonical way to design frameworks at Microsoft. They carry the experience and cumulative wisdom of thousands of developer hours, over three versions of the .NET Framework.  NOTE: This video is almost four hours long!  I actually saw it in a span of three days.  I recommend watching this video during lunch with your team…nobody will be disappointed.  You can also download the whole presentation here (460 Mb).