Executive summary: it’s called APPropriate Behaviour, head over to the LeanPub site to check it out.
For quite a while, I’ve noticed that posts here are moving away from nuts and bolts code towards questions about evaluating my own performance, working with other developers and the industry in general.
I decided to spend some time working on these and related thoughts, trying to derive some consistent narrative as well as satisfying myself that these ideas were indeed going somewhere. I quickly ended up with about half of a novel-length book.
The other half is coming soon, but in the meantime the book is already published in preview state. To quote from the introduction:
this book is about the things that go into being a programmer that aren’t specifically the programming. It starts fairly close to home, with chapters on development tools, on supporting your own programming needs, and on other “software engineering” practices that programmers should understand and make use of. But by the end of the book we’ll be talking about psychology and metacognition — about understanding how you the programmer function and how to improve that functioning.
As I said, this is currently in very much a preview state—only about half of the content is there, it hasn’t been reviewed, and the thread that runs through it has dropped a few stitches. However, even if you buy the book now you’ll get free updates forever so you’ll get to find out as chapters are added and as changes are made.
At this early stage I’m particularly interested in any feedback readers have. I’ve set up a Glassboard for the book—in the Glassboard app, use invite code XVSSV to join the discussion.
I hope you enjoy APPropriate behaviour!
