After a year and a half, the completely revised and re-edited book is now available from all Amazon sites, in both print and Kindle editions.
People have recently asked me what they can expect from The Programmer’s Black Book. My short answer is that I wish someone had pointed out or warned me about certain aspects of software development eight or ten years ago—not necessarily technical ones. Projects tend to fail for the same reasons: poor technical judgment, disorganization and bad planning, incohesive teams, a lack of even a basic methodology, and so on. In short, it is usually the same set of circumstances.
Sometimes I see software developers who, rather than programming well, seem to play carelessly at what they do. We can and should be professionals who pursue quality in our work while making it as enjoyable as possible. In this respect, and paraphrasing a chapter from Josh Kaufman’s book The Personal MBA, to advance our careers we should treat and manage ourselves as if we were businesses: our greatest asset is ourselves, and we should always strive to deliver and produce quality work.
So what comes next?
The book includes several previously unpublished chapters. One of them is the Highly Productive Software Developer Test, a simple set of questions that helps identify what we do well—and not so well—to work productively (that is, avoid wasting time, our only truly valuable asset, and achieve more and better results). Over the coming months, among other things, I’ll explore the most relevant of those questions on The Programmer’s Black Book blog.
I truly hope this work proves useful to you.