JoergM.com

There are some obvious reasons why you should start blogging when you are a programmer. Most of them also apply to everybody else:

• You share your knowledge. This is a benefit for all of us. If everybody would be blogging about all the little issues they had then a Google-Search would help us even more. I am sure nearly every problem in the world is already solved. It is just not written down.
• It’s a kind of self marketing. A potential employer can get a much better picture of your abilities than he could from CVs or references. When I hire somebody it is already a huge plus for him when he has a blog at all.
• Explaining things to other people is the best way to learn. You can only teach what you fully understand. This is at least as efficient as hands on experience.
• You might even make some money with blogging. There are several sites about this. If you are interested look here or here.

But the main reason is something else. Some years ago I read an article about software documentation. There was a lot of wisdom in it, but one phrase sticked to my brain:

Programming is doing something weird to your brain. When you write a piece of documentation right after a programming session the result is likely to be barely readable for human beings.

If that’s true then the opposite should work too.  Blogging teaches you to write for people, which is exactly what you should do in your code. Good code needs to be easy to understand to be easy to maintain. There are whole books about this like the famous Clean Code by Uncle Bob.

I think blogging does something weird to your brain, that makes your code better readable for human beings. So:

If you want to become a better programmer, start blogging!

I recently saw Bob Martins Keynote on Øredev. Around time index 14:30 he is talking about length of iterations. This reminded me on some experiences we made recently when trying sprints of one week in some of our teams. So here are some aspects we found.

The Good

• Scrum zeremonies are done very often. The people on the teams were used to scrum, but the teams were new. So the training effect of doing planning, review and retrospectives so often was good. By the way, the zeremonies are proportionally shorter. There is no waste of time just because there done more often.
• The short iterations gave a good feedback on where the project was going and how long this will take.
• The focus is very high on completing the sprint-tasks, but this is not only a good side. See also the Ugly.
• Teambuilding happens faster than with longer iterations. I think this is mainly, because teambuilding needs all phases of an iteration to be completed and shorter iterations mean the phases happen more often.

The Bad

• Tasks need to be prepared very well. A one week iteration is not only challenging for the team. It is even more challenging for the product owner. Tasks need to be well prepared and small enough to fit into one week.
• Some people on the team will not like such a short iteration. You need to get the commitment of everybody that they want to try this for a while.
• Things that go wrong, hurt faster and harder. This is good as long as the real reason will be removed. But it is easy to think of the short iteration to be the problem instead of the real reason.

The Ugly

• As already said, it is easy to get in a situation where the one week iteration is seen as the problem even if there are other reasons. This can remove this option for the future. So make sure the situation is ready, before you try.
• People can feel like being in a hamster’s wheel. This prevents from taking a step back and seeing the whole picture. Short sprints can show a lot of problems in the process, but they can hide larger issues or prevent alternative approaches. Everybody just feels they have no time for it.

So what is your experience with one week sprints? Is it just like Uncle Bob says: “It takes a real man to do one week iterations”?

Jurgen Appelo of noop.nl had a nice post of the books he was reading recently called “My Book Slide“. He is reading a lot. I found some of the books were the same I was reading lately. So here is My Book Slide:

Sep. 2008

Robert C. Martin: Clean Code *****

Not much to say about this book except You have to read it. It is already a classic.

Oct. 2008

Neal Ford: The Productive Programmer ***

Nice book about all those little habits that make a difference in ones productivity. My favorite quote is: “There are people running their computers and others that are just walking them.”

Nov. 2008

Dan Roam: The Back of the Napkin **

Small book about explaining things visually. Dan Roam explains some easy to remember methods on how to find the right picture. For whatever reason I was expecting more of this book than it delivered.

Dec. 2008

Tom DeMarco: Adrenaline Junkies and Template Zombies ****

Great read. Nice little patterns of what are good or bad behaviours in projects. Each pattern is really short, only 2-3 pages. So it’s an ideal book to read in small breaks. The only drawback is that they are trying to follow the “Pattern-Trend”.

Nicholas Carr: The Big Switch **

Nicholas explains the analogy between utilization of electricity in the early twentieth century and the current situation in our industry. Some nice ideas, but most of it not as new or revolutionary as the cover promisses.

Roman Pichler: Scrum ****

The bestselling german book on scrum. Explains scrum very well and has also some good ideas on how to scale scrum.

Jan. 2009

Andy Hunt: Pragmatic Thinking and Learning – Refactor Your Wetware *****

This is my book of the year so far. It explains a lot around how we think and how we learn. It shows ways to improve this for everybody in a language that software developers can easily understand. But the best thing in the book is the Dreyfus-model. It explained some phenomenons I was wondering about for a long time.

Rothman, Derby: Behind Closed Doors ****

They are using the concept of story telling to explain important techniques of management. I found a lot of tips for my work. The book is just a bit short, not even 200 pages.

Currently reading

Pete McBreen: Software Craftsmanship

I like the concept of software developers being craftsmen since the I first read about it was in The Pragmatic Programmer of Hunt and Thomas. So I am curious, what this book will say about it.