What I Talk About When I Talk About Programming (Volume 1)

Programming is not the same as building a professional career as a programmer.

In this first volume of What I Talk About When I Talk About Programming, Rafael Gómez Blanes brings together a selection of the most visited and widely linked articles from his website (www.rafablanes.com).

Reviewed, corrected, and in some cases rewritten, each chapter explores a different aspect of software development and draws on the author’s experience over recent years.

This book is essential reading for amateur, junior, and senior developers. It covers topics such as what causes technical debt, how to document a software project properly, how to recognize a bad project manager, and why technical breaks and retrospectives are useful. It also explores how to work in a more organized way and develop personal skills—things that can help you become a better professional and advance your career faster.

In the author’s own words: “This is one of those books I wish I had read as soon as I finished my studies. I would have made fewer mistakes, made much faster progress, and faced fewer difficulties.”

What I Talk About When I Talk About Programming (Volume 1)

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Here is the book’s chapter list:

Introduction
1. The Kaizen programmer
1. What technical debt is and how it arises
1. Simplify
1. What readability means
1. The code doesn’t tell the whole story
1. Is your boss a good software project manager?
1. On estimating projects in hours
1. Refactor a project’s structure
1. Micro-improvements
1. On operating a system
1. Extract subprojects from a project
1. Managing uncertainty
1. Amateur, junior, or senior developer?
1. On software architecture
1. The twelve keys to entrepreneurship
1. Take technical breaks
1. Don’t create knowledge silos
1. Events and component orchestration
1. Thoughts on remote work
1. When is a software project finished?
1. Hold retrospectives
1. The art of the digital entrepreneur
1. The ten habits of a good developer
1. Invest in yourself
1. Improving when working on projects
1. Damn interruptions
1. Hiring the best
1. The old Joel Test
1. This has to be ready by tomorrow
1. Scalability doesn’t depend on the database
1. Create simple and efficient work environments
1. Love what you do, or do something else
1. Prototyping a new application
1. The happy path in tests (or happy tests)