Category: 2010

Booked in February

A short book preview of the upcoming O’Reilly title “97 Things Every Programmer Should Know” and our participation in it.

Ok, the title is a bit misleading – it’s a play of words(*). This entry is actually a book preview on the upcoming book “97 Things Every Programmer Should Know” from O’Reilly.

97 Things Of Wisdom

The “97 Things” series started out with “97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know” early last year. The book essentially is a collection of short articles on specific topics that should bother today’s software architect. You may classify as a software architect if you don’t just stir up source code but are also in charge to give the system a shape.

The articles are straight to the point and can be read within five minutes each. Don’t expect detailed textbook chapters of the topics, but they work extremely well as creative appetizers. And there are nearly a hundred appetizers from well-respected members of the software architect community in this book.

Just imagine you would meet all the authors for five minutes each on a conference and just ask them for an appealing thought. This book serves as the best replacement for it.

Wisdom continued

Soon after the first book, there was a second book in the series, “97 Things Every Project Manager Should Know”. I haven’t read this one yet, but it is on my must-read list for 2010.

And now, next month, there will be another book, this time for the fellow coder: “97 Things Every Programmer Should Know”. As usual, there are 97 selected articles with bits of wisdom from big community names. Kevlin Henney is the editor for this book (we featured him in our last blog harvest). You can take a sneak peek online in the 97TEPSK wiki, where the articles were fostered (and a second part is likely to emerge). But don’t forget to buy a paper copy that you can foist on your peers to inspire them, too.

Telling from the articles I’ve read so far, the book will be great. Please don’t expect detailed language specifics, lengthy code examples or fancy UML diagrams. But expect a whole bunch of great ideas that stem from real experiences of real programmers.

One percent of a book

What’s our relation to the new book? We’ve contributed an article to it! Even if we thereby only wrote approximately one percent of the book, it feels great and we consider ourselves honored.

The topic of our article is Extreme Feedback Devices (XFD): “Let Your Project Speak for Itself”. We gathered quite a lot of these devices over the years and ran a few experiments, so we thought we are qualified to write about it. And there it is, the first bit of our wisdom, printed in a book.

We will, of course, continue to publish our wisdom on this blog first. If you’ve followed us over the last years, the article comes as no real surprise. But I’m sure some other articles of the book will. Go buy it!

(*) Play of words in a language other than your native tongue are always dangerous. I hope this one worked out well.

Schneide blog heartbeat revisited

A short review of our company blogging engagement in 2009, with a description of the underlying rules.

The start of a new year is a great opportunity to look back and review the old year. This article reviews this blog, how we run it and what happened in 2009.

The first review

This blog came to life in February 2007 and was revived and retrofitted with a basic rule set in August 2008. Exactly a year ago, i wrote a first review of the changes, explaining some of the rules behind it and judging the outcome. You might want to read it in order to understand some of the following metaphors.

A year with constant pace

We haven’t changed the rules in a year. We still run this blog at a constant, sustainable pace. We still collect and foster “vegetables”, our metaphor for blog entries. Everyone in our company has a “garden” full of blog entry drafts that evolve over time and finally get published. We still don’t think that maintaining a company blog has to lead to internal competition or a blog quality assurance department.

We ran this blog for a whole year with weekly entries by just passing the blog token around. Instead of getting tired to write yet another blog entry, we sometimes asked to publish our entry ahead of time just because it was ready and eager to meet the world. We kept discipline, but in a flexible manner.

The results

What can you expect to happen when all you do is to keep your flow (we call it “obeying the mechanics”)? A single picture tells it all:

You see the visitor statistics from the day we revived the blog. The small mound around 2008-10 was last year’s visitor maximum. We grew every month this year. We did expect the numbers to grow, but not exponentially as in the last months. We are overwhelmed by success. Which leads to a few additional rules.

The additional rules

  • As the amount of discussion around our blog rises, we introduced the rule of “author-based commenting“. Every comment on our blog needs to get our approval (by saying something on topic, we just filter out the spam) and will eventually get an answer from us. The responsible person for both actions is the original blog entry author. This may lead to slightly longer approval delays, but adds coherence to the comment trail and discussion tone.
  • We regularly publish our articles on aggregator sites like dzone.com. All of these sites provide their own commenting system. We tend not to answer comments on these sites. It would shatter the discussion without benefit for the ordinary visitor. If you want us to answer, feel free to copy the comment into our blog.
  • We introduced some regularly “events” in our company last year. The Open Source Love Day (OSLD), the Dev Brunch and the occasional Blog Harvest are all worth to write about, but are attended by many authors. We agreed to publish these special event entries out of turn, whenever they are ready but in a timely manner. These entries share a common icon set to distinguish them from regular entries. They are a cocktail of our combined writing skills and tend to be very specific. Regard them as “bonus tracks” on our written company album.

What to expect in the future

We are looking forward to keep our pace in 2010. The blog will receive a facelift and better integration with our website soon. We plan to provide some improvements on finding relating groups of existing articles. But we don’t want to make changes in our ruleset or dedication.

If you happen to follow us on our blog, drop a comment. We really like to hear from you. By the way, in 2010 the first entry on reader request will be published. Stay tuned!