Interesting Readings

The purpose of this page is to keep track of interesting content I’ve read. While primarily focused on blog posts, the collection may eventually include books, academic papers, and other media forms.

I copied the idea from here.

Table of Contents

• Career
• Debates
• History
• Management
• Programming
• Writing

Career

• What if companies interviewed translators the way they interview coders? by Jose J. Pérez Aguinaga
  An article in which the author uses a fun analogy to show some of the absurdities of modern tech interviewing.

Debates

• APOSD vs Clean Code: A Debate by John Ousterhout, Robert C. Martin
  A debate between Robert C. Martin, author of “Clean Code”, and John Ousterhout, author of “A Philosophy of Software Design”, about the differences in their approaches to code quality and software maintainability.

History

• A Git story: Not so fun this time by Brachiosoft Blog
  A brief history of the creation of Git.

Management

• Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule by Paul Graham
  A 15-year-old article that still rings true today. If you’re a manager who can’t understand why your developers hate meetings, impromptu calls, and other distractions, make yourself—and them—a favor and read this.

Programming

• The Grug Brained Developer
  A humorous guide about software development learnings, collected over the author’s career. In a way, it’s a warning against unnecessary complexity.

• Choose Boring Technology by Dan McKinley
  I don’t really like the title of this, but I strongly agree with the article: don’t choose technology based on hype alone.

• Take your pragmatism for a unicycle ride by Richard Marmorstein
  The author argues that developers should, sometimes, make choices that are fun and keep them energized rather than being purely pragmatic 100% of the time.

• What’s hidden behind “just implementation details” by Nicole Tietz-Sokolskaya
  A great piece in which the author argues that even work that’s often dismissed by engineers as “just implementation details” or “just a CRUD app” can have lots of challenges.

• Writing system software: code comments by Salvatore Sanfilippo aka antirez
  Code comments today have something of a bad reputation. In this piece, antirez comes in defense of comments and creates a whole taxonomy of types of comments, explaining when and how to use them effectively.

• Challenging projects every programmer should try by Austin Z. Henley
  A compilation of programming projects to improve your skill as a programmer.

• More challenging projects every programmer should try by Austin Z. Henley
  A sequel to the above.

• Challenging algorithms and data structures every programmer should try by Austin Z. Henley
  Yet another sequel, this time targeting algorithms and data structures.

Writing

• A blogging style guide by Robert Heaton
  A collection of tips to improve one’s writing as a blog author.

• A blogging style guide vol. 2 by Robert Heaton
  A sequel to the above.