Quite recently a team member wanted to suggest interesting technical books to read for a junior engineer. I figured I might as well write my top 5 books here, in no particular order. I believe every Software Engineer should own these books, but reading them is a very good start ;)
Posts for: #Meta
Knowing when to delete code
Much of the literature and writing related to sofware development focuses on the creation, new ideas, fresh ideas and things to improve in your next project. But when is it a good moment to delete the old stuff in an long term project? Here’s my short rant about this; I recently deleted a chunk of code in my current project and just felt I wanted to write my thoughts.
Dear SDK developer
As an application developer I get to use many third party code to integrate it into my current project. I want to share a checklist of things a user of an SDK really appreciates.
Poor man’s functional programming
It’s a very exciting time to be an iOS or Mac developer. The platform moves very fast and we got a new toy (language) to play with: Swift. It’s the perfect time to reevaluate, learn and evolve as a programmer, because you will be forced to adopt this new language (yes, I think Swift is the future, 100%).
I want to relate this to the fact that most iOS engineers, or mobile application developers, are traditionally familiar with Object Oriented Programming paradigm. But Swift offers more than different syntax and OOP.
I’m referring to some features inspired by functional languages. If you’ve ever had an interest, but never the chance or motivation to go forth and look into this paradigm, now it’s the perfect time to do it.
Freehand Drawing
Yesterday my last post on the series ‘Let’s build Freehand Drawing for iOS’ has been published at Badoo Tech blog. It’s been a very good experience for me, and of course I recommend you visit the tutorials if you are interested.
I divided the tutorials in 3 parts:
- Part 1: Introduces the feature and a naive implementation
- Part 2: Adds undo functionality, refactoring along the way
- Part 3: Improves stroke to make it look smoother
Building tutorials is hard
This series has been my first take on writing technical tutorials. And I must say that it’s a lot harder than I thought. You need to keep track of the content, code correctness, and the pace of the articles so it’s readable and understandable. Coding while writing an article is challenging, but the experience has been very gratifying.
One commit a day
One commit a day. A lesson I’ve learned the hard way when dealing with long-term side projects.
Code injection: Continued
I’ve recently done a short talk @Badoo about code injection. Summarized and gave a demo of my previous blog post.
Check it out if you are interested. Feedback on the talk is more than welcome, contact me
Travis + octopress = Yay!
I just finished setting up Travis CI integration with this blog. So now I don’t even need to do rake generate_deploy. Just git push to source and deploy after 3 mins. Happiness.
I based my config on Hari Menon’s post.
My small contribution to whoever happens to read this post is: Don’t forget to set up your user.name and user.email in Travis CI. Check my final travis.yml if you are curious.
Happy coding!
Technical fanatism
Whenever I meet some developer, I can always get a really interesting conversation. Be it tools, opinions on platforms, favorite blogs, books, or
some new technique I didn’t know about.
That’s why it’s important to discuss with other people in the field their opinions, they challenge your assumptions and you can gain useful
insights which otherwise would be hidden to you for longer. But sometimes, you hit a wall. Somebody does not listen.