by Takashi Yoshida on June 14, 2009
I picked up some programming books to read over this summer.
I picked up The Mythical Man-Month and The Pragmatic Programmer from Journeyman to Master because those books were among the recommended reading list in Pragmatic Thinking & Learning and The Productive Programmer. I started to read both books and from what little I have read so far, The Pragmatic Programmer feels more interesting. I will finish reading THe Pragmatic Programmer first and move on to The Mythical Man-Month.
I do not exactly remember how I found out about The Art of Concurrency. I think I found out about this book from someone’s tweets. My work project began using more threads (and the team already discovered a few thread issues) so I thought this makes an appropriate read. Even without my project using more threads, it is time that I learn to use threads correctly. I am probably going to read this book along The Pragmatic Programmer.
I am interested in creating a few Git repositories for personal use. I am going
I am planning on creating a few Git repositories (for personal use) so I thought I would learn how to use git. It looks and operates differently enough from Subversion (especially the initial repository creation; no trunk, tags and branches directories?).
I do not have any issues with my Subversion repositories, but I thought I might learn about Git and what is this distributed version control system is all about. I will probably set up my own repositories a bit later. Hopefully this book will help me how to use it and how it works compared to Subversion. It is nice that Git does not require you to be connected to the network. I think my project team may also like it (since our access to TFS is really slow now) but I doubt we will make a switch.
There are a lot to read this summer for me. But Singapore is summer all year-long, so I have until the end of this year to finish them.
by Takashi Yoshida on May 9, 2009
I finally received a new workstation (Dell Precision T3500) at work. My old one from two years ago (Another Dell machine, running dual Pentium 4 3.0GHz with 4GB RAM) builds my project in 12 minutes from scratch (Visual Studio 2005 project containing 82 sub-projects). My colleague’s workstation builds it in less than 3 minutes.
I did not have enough time to set it up today (network access went down after office hour) but it will be interesting to see how much faster compared to my old workstation (Hopefully it beats my colleague’s machine too).
I will be going through The Productive Programmer again to gather all cool tools for my new workstation.
I already installed the following:
I have a few more that I plan to install:
So far, I found Adobe Acrobat Reader 8 to be very slow on my new workstation. I tried upgrading it to Acrobat Reader 9 but scrolling speed is still very sluggish. A test PDF file is 18 pages long and contains mostly text with some images. I also tried upgrading the video driver but it did not help. I’m wondering if I should look for a third party PDF reader.
I am also looking for a way to reassign some keys to different programs. For example, my new Dell keyboard has some keys that launch web browser, email and etc. I am thinking if I can use it to launch applications from my project.
Now, I need to find out if NVIDIA Quadro NVS 295 supports CUDA.
by Takashi Yoshida on April 28, 2009
I picked up The Productive Programmer (by Neal Ford, O’Reilly) shortly after my business trip to France. I have seen this book at bookstores and even skimmed a few pages a number of times, but I never put it into my reading list until early this month.
I have been working on my current software project a few years and I was hoping that this book would help me become a more productive and better programmer.
The Productive Programmer is divided into two sections; Mechnics and Practice. In Mechanics section, Ford introduces many shortcuts and tips to accelerate your daily routines. He covers all major platforms (Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X and Linux) and many tips are cross-platform and non-language specific so you will be able to learn some things out of this book. He also discusses using tools to automate your tedious tasks.
I found “Kill Distraction” and “Use Rooted Views” especially useful for getting better focus in Microsoft Windows development environment. I still need to tame my urge to check Twitter and Delicious feeds but I am going to work that out with “Interact with RSS Feeds” section soon.
In Practice section, Ford discusses Test-Driven Design (TDD) and concepts such as YAGNI, SLAP and Composed Method. I found the Composed Method and SLAP (Single Level of Abstraction Principle) very interesting. After I began to put these concepts into practice, I feel my refactored code is becoming clearer than before. Some public methods began to read more like an outline of instructions.
I think I made the right choice to pick up and read this book. It is not too long but it has a good collection of useful tips and explanations of concepts. Even though I develop .NET applications in C#, I did not have any issues with Java code examples in the book. You can start practicing the tips and concepts as soon as you finish reading them. I recommend this book to any software developers (and also team leaders).
by Takashi Yoshida on April 17, 2009
by Takashi Yoshida on March 19, 2009
I will be off to Paris, France for two weeks. It is going to be busy two weeks for me so I may not post anything at all. After this month is over, I will try to resume my “ambitious” one post per week routine.
