Curated Content August 2021
August was a slower month for curated content, but here are the picks.
Articles
Two Elements of Pair Programming Skill
Covers different patterns and anti-patterns that make for good pair programming sessions. The don't list includes ones we've all witnessed or been part of, like Drowning the Partner.
Books
No non-fiction recommendations for the month of August, but in the realm of fiction I thoroughly enjoyed Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir. A fun read continuing the Locked Tomb Series.
Conference Talks
No conference talks this month.
Podcasts
Cal Newport on an Industrial Revolution for Office Work
An excellent discussion from Cal Newport touching on many of the highlights of his new book A World Without Email, about how we've largely screwed up knowledge work as a society by letting it take place in an ad-hoc way, rather than optimizing it as a coherent process of work.
Tweets
a microservice is what you call it when, three years in, the original monolith programmer is tired of dealing with their own legacy code, tired of code review, and begins a greenfield project to recapture the feeling of working on their own once morehttps://t.co/M3xodVuYAe
— tef (@tef_ebooks) August 6, 2021
A tongue-in-cheek thread about microservices.
A mental model I have:
— Patrick McKenzie (@patio11) August 25, 2021
The industry is so bad at evaluating early career engineers, and there are such great variances in performance, that it has a model which looks a bit like tenure track faculty, where a secondary sort happens post-employment.
If one fails it, managed out.
A discussion from @patio11 on how we fail as an industry at evaluating and nuturing talent, and how that plays out in compensation.