Today I want to share with you a review of the most exciting book I have listened to so far –“Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions” by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths*.* I have already mentioned it on this blog when simulating the secretary problem. This is just an example of many fascinating problems this book talks about. Continue reading to find out why it makes such an amazing listening experience. ...
I have blogged about my road to productivity recently. I received a comment there from one of my readers asking me if I have a secret weapon that helped me be so productive. While I don’t have a secret weapon strictly for productivity, I realised that I have a secret weapon (or two) for learning. That weapon is simply… Audiobooks! Why Audiobooks? Why would you get an audiobook? What is so magical about them, when you can simply read a book (a paper version) or an eBook (on your Kindle or something similar? ...
You might have noticed that I like reading books. I have recently read *“Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions”*which absolutely fascinated me! The book mentions a famous optimal stopping (Wikipedia) problem called Secretary Problem. In this blog post, I will explain it and then we will have some fun simulating it with Java. Let’s see if we can find a solution by brute force! Secretary Problem Defined Imagine that you need to hire a secretary. Imagine now that you have 100 candidates that you are going to interview. Because you are a perfect interviewer, you can compare every single person against everyone else that you have seen so far. After the interview, you have to either hire the person or reject. If you reject, you can’t change your mind. You win if you have managed to hire the best candidate out of the whole lot. ...
Being productive and motivated- who wouldn’t want that? I used to think that some people are just bornmore motivated, that some people simply are this way. “The War of Art” is an eye-opening book. I think that if I have never read it- it is unlikely that I would manage to write two articles a week for this blog ever since starting in January 2018. Here is a short story on my road to productivity. ...
*“Scrum Mastery: From Good To Great Servant-Leadership” –*a book that I picked up recently based on it being the number one selling book about Agile Methodologies (from Amazon). I also wanted a fresh view on that role, given that I work in a Scrum team myself. Was it worth my time? Definitely! I did not really know what to expect from this book. There are plenty of “Scrum manuals” out there, which more often than not, describe some idealised realities. ...
Recently I have been taking a bit of a step back from microservices and trying to look at systems architecture from a more general perspective. With that mindset, I have picked up “Clean Architecture” (Amazon) by the “Legendary Craftsman” (that’s probably the publisher’s enthusiasm!) Robert C. Martin “Uncle Bob”. What follows is my thoughts and overall review of the book. SOLID foundations The book starts quite a bit below the abstract levels of architecture. We are treated to a very entertaining review of the journey from Structured Programming, through Object-Oriented Programming and ending on Functional Programming. ...
Three years ago I was looking for a new job. I decided that I will pick up a couple of books to help me revised for the interviews. One of those books was*“Cracking the Coding Interview”*by Gayle Laakmann Mcdowell. I expected a book that will help me revise for the interviews, but I got a lot more from the book! Programming interview questions and answers The main idea behind this book is to give you a list of programming questions that may come up during the interview and teach you how to solve them. ...
Who wouldn’t want to work as a part of a happy and motivated software team? Wouldn’t it be great if every team you ever worked with was like that? Based on Leaders Eat Last by Simon Sinek and Drive by Daniel Pink, I will tell you how to make this possible. What motivates developers? There are different ideas out there about how to motivate people. The two most common ones are- bonuses (or other financial rewards) and fun work (challenging, interesting etc.). While there is some truth to both, they do not give the full picture. ...
Writing good software requires using the right tools. Choosing the right frameworks, libraries and designing smart systems. With all that to learn and worry about, it is easy to forget about another very important thing: using your programming language wisely. In this article, I want to introduce you to *“Effective Java”*by Joshua Bloch. Effective Java– back to “basics” With the JVM ecosystem moving faster than ever, it is easy for us to forget that writing good software is more than using frameworks correctly. ...
Every now and then you read a book that completely changes how you understand something. “The Phoenix Project” (Amazon) changed how I understand DevOps and driving positive transformations in companies. Keep reading to see why I think everyone working in the software industry should read this book. The DevOps revolution I believe that as of 2018 the whole software industry is going through a DevOps revolution, similar to the Agile revolution that already took place. ...