It’s been four years since I published The Programmer’s Black Book, with a second revision of the work the year before. Since then, the number of Amazon reviews has kept growing, as have the messages I’ve received directly from people in many parts of the world.
Ultimately, all of this has helped me realize that the problems described in the book are common throughout the industry, regardless of the country you work in or the kind of company you work for.
Poor organization, software developed without a testing culture, project managers who don’t understand the nature of software projects, overly individualistic developers, and a lack of clean-code culture and knowledge of refactoring techniques. These issues aren’t unique to the Spanish-speaking world—not by any means. Just look at some GitHub repositories, including some very popular ones.
I’ve worked on international projects with companies in Sweden, the United States, and countries in the Middle East and South America. I can say that what I’ve often seen is more of the same: the same dynamics and similar problems, with a few exceptions that taught me a great deal and inspired me. I was lucky to cross paths with them.
So I’ve released a new edition of The Programmer’s Black Book, this time in English, hoping it will be just as helpful to English-speaking developers as it has been to readers in Spanish.
We live in a global market where digital products and knowledge have few borders, and English is the de facto standard language in the technology industry.
I hope this new work will be just as useful to readers who don’t speak Spanish but do read English, and that it will do as well as The Programmer’s Black Book has over the past few years.
From now on, I plan to keep adding English content to my personal website.