Some highlights from Matthew Wear’s selections:
“It is not your employer’s responsibility to train you, or to send you to conferences, or to buy you books. These things are your responsibility.”
“Here is a minimal list of the things that every software professional should be conversant with: • Design patterns. You ought to be able to describe all 24 patterns in the GOF book and have a working knowledge of many of the patterns in the POSA books. • Design principles. You should know the SOLID principles and have a good understanding of the component principles. • Methods. You should understand XP, Scrum, Lean, Kanban, Waterfall, Structured Analysis, and Structured Design. • Disciplines. You should practice TDD, Object-Oriented design, Structured Programming, Continuous Integration, and Pair Programming. • Artifacts: You should know how to use: UML, DFDs, Structure Charts, Petri Nets, State Transition Diagrams and Tables, flow charts, and decision tables.”
“The frenetic rate of change in our industry means that software developers must continue to learn copious quantities just to keep up. Woe to the architects who stop coding—they will rapidly find themselves irrelevant. Woe to the programmers who stop learning new languages—they will watch as the industry passes them by. Woe to the developers who fail to learn new disciplines and techniques—their peers will excel as they decline.”
“Sometimes the best way to solve a problem is to go home, eat dinner, watch TV, go to bed, and then wake up the next morning and take a shower.”
“Remember, as a professional it is your job to help your team create the best software they can. That means that everybody needs to watch out for errors and slip-ups, and work together to correct them.”
“School can teach the theory of computer programming. But school does not, and cannot teach the discipline, practice, and skill of being a craftsman.”