Games people play left me with very mixed feelings. On one side the core idea of transactional psychology and Games is really interesting. I really liked the beginning of the book. On the other hand content seems a bit irrelevant at times and does not explain the subject all that well.
Build a great team is a really nice little book. It is very easy to read and contains a lot of useful tips on how to work with a team. A nice surprise was the fact that author advocates for my favorite leadership style "servant leadership", which is based on support, understanding and help, not giving orders.
I have seen this issue many many times throughout my career so i thought it might be worth to go through it in details and help others.
If you have international content in your database and suddenly you see things like "é" or missing characters like "?" instead of "è" you may be in trouble. It is a symptom of lack of consistency in the ways you write, read and store unicode characters.
I hope my explanation, even that lengthy, will shed some light on the core of the problem and possible solutions :)
I am very happy to share my first-ever screencast.
Screencast is about my open source project called phpProxyBuilder. It is a PHP library aimed at code reuse and promotion of proxy design pattern in PHP. It is heavily inspired by AOP and helps to implement cross-cutting concerns once and reuse the same code forever. It also promotes some of my favourite design principles like decoupling, testability, single responsibility and code reuse.
I wanted to create some screencasts for a while but I found it difficult to get the right tools. Fortunately screencasting and video editing are much easier on linux now and i hope to share more screencasts about PHP, open source and software design in the future :)
If I had to summarize this book with a single word it would have to be "disappointing". I had quite high hopes for it as I read some of the “beautiful” book series before and they were really good. Unfortunately beautiful teams is not that great at all. I am not sure who would I recommend it to anyone.
The art of lean software is a very short book. I was really surprised when I got it delivered home. It is not a bad book though. Even that most of the practices are common sense nowadays I still people should spare few hours to read it.
I have seen too may people not following these common sense rules to discourage anyone from reading the book. Don't expect breakthrough, just a list of useful advice.
I have not read a book about computer algorithms for a long time now. I liked parts of the programming pearls and I disliked parts as well. I think it is worth going through the book if you are a software engineer. Especially if you want to get better at designing efficient software or if you want to practice on some non-trivial programming puzzles.
In general I think it is a a solid book.
Any time I take a break from work to travel I buy a few different books outside of my main interests to get some food for thought. I loved The Grand Design, it is really so much fun to read :)
I loved The Grand Design as it does not contain even one math formula. It is more of a philosophical book talking about different models of reality, explaining theories and showing nice analogies. Author makes some amazing points and presents some of the most popular and interesting theories. He manages to simplify and present them in very understandable ways. I think the book can be understood by almost anyone, it is written exceptionally well!
I never thought i would ever say it about any autobiography book, but this one is really nice to read. Richard Branson is obviously an exceptional person, before reading the book i had no idea how exceptional he really is though.
If you are looking for inspirations and some good life lessons, read the book. I think you will not be disappointed. It is a really interesting story and a good set of life advice.
That is a really exceptional book! You would expect googler's books to be good, but this one is really great. Don't waste time, just order a copy you wont regret it.
Team Geek is a great source of knowledge not just for leaders but for all the people who work with software engineers (or who are engineers themselves).
I have read about mongodb quite a lot on-line last year and i also managed to pick up this book. I think it is a really easy to read and well written book. If you want to get some good basics on mongodb i think it is worth checking it out.
It is structured more like a tutorial / reference manual i guess as it focuses a lot on practical examples and usage of different commands.
I have been in quite a few technical job interviews in recent years and I think I can see some patterns of why people fail. You can find a lot of guides on how to get the dream job or how to behave in the engineering interview but there are few tips on what not to do. I thought it may help some people in getting their dream jobs or maybe even becoming better engineers. Here are three simple things to avoid during the software engineer interview.
Cacti is an awesome tool but it requires quite a lot of manual work to setup new metrics measurement and begin graphing. As i am a total monitoring freak i love to have insight into different aspects of my applications. I love to export custom metrics and graph them in cacti but i found it too time consuming so i hacked a cacti graph and input method generator this weekend. The code is a bit primitive so please forgive me but i needed it to do just one particular thing it is not a multi purpose code really :)
I think some of you may find it useful as learning cacti for the first time and manually setting up custom graphs can be difficult so this script should help, check it out.
Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture by Martin Fowler was not exactly as i imagined. First of all it was written in early 2000s and you can feel that it got a little bit outdated. Back in 2003 I am sure it was a really great source of patterns and best practices but from current perspective it may be a bit less relevant.
The book has some really good parts and I think every engineer would benefit from skimming through it. Way too often I see engineers with huge haps in important areas as concurrency, distributed systems, decoupling etc. I think there is still quite a lot of relevant knowledge in the book.
The Lean Startup by Eric Ries is a great book and I am happy to recommend it to all entrepreneurs, managers, business owners and software engineers.
It is very difficult to summarise a book like The Lean Startup in a blog post. It contains a lot of information and a whole new ideology for how starups should be built.
Even that i kept reading about lean startups and MVP (minimal viable product) a lot this year, I still found The Lean Starup to be a very interesting book.
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Hi, my name is Artur Ejsmont,
welcome to my blog.
I am a passionate software engineer living in Sydney and working for Yahoo! Drop me a line or leave a comment.
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