Brown - Programming Beyond Practices: Be More Than Just a Code Monkey

• 2016-10-04: First Release

The story arc of this book covers a full career in software development, condensed down into a quick read that is meant to be accessible to all practicing developers.

: You are a competent programmer, and you are putting your skills to good use by helping people explore new product ideas through rapid prototyping.

: Your work becomes more complicated. You need to incrementally grow existing systems and you have many active customers to support. Theres a feeling of conflict between what you think is the right way to work, and the pressure around you to ship new features quickly.

: You gain a deeper understanding of the costs of rushed decision making, especially at the integration points between your own code and the outside world. Youve learned a great deal from past mistakes, and have started to focus on the complex relationships between business, customer service, and technical work.

: You are now a highly experienced developer. You are capable of helping others understand how to think about programming and problem solving, and have started to mentor a friend who is new to the field.

: Youve become an effective teacher, and your development experience is strong enough that youre able to think on your feet, even in the context of live demonstrations. You use these skills to help students bridge the gap between theory and practice in a classroom setting.

: You are starting to progress down the path to mastery. Youre able to pinpoint the weak spots of legacy software systems and design proper replacements for them, optimizing for both business outcomes and human-friendly workflows.

: You now have enough familiarity with the whole business of software that youre capable of working within an organization to identify and fix problems at every level. Your core competency is still in software development, but youve gained enough experience to communicate well at many levels.

: You start to wonder about the future of the computing industry as a whole. At this point, youre free to pick your own career path, so figuring out where youre going and why starts to be the most important question.

Because the career of a software developer is more like a spiral than a line, I encourage you to read through all of these chapters, no matter what your current skill level is.

Ive written these stories to work at many levels, and theres no dividing line between the basic and advanced topics in this book. Each chapter is self-contained, so jumping around is alright...but for best results, read from cover to cover.

Imagine that you work for an agency that helps clients navigate the early stages of product design and project planning.

No matter what problem space you are working in, the first step isalways to get ideas out of a clients head and into the world as quicklyas you possibly can. Conversations and wireframes can be useful forfinding a starting point, but exploratory programming soon followsbecause words and pictures alone can only take you so far.

By getting working software into the mix early in the process, productdesign becomes an interactive collaboration. Fast feedback loops allowstumbling blocks to be quickly identified and dealt with before they canburn up too much time and energy in the later (and more expensive)stages of development.

There are many moving parts in even the most simple software systems, so it pays to set them in motion early on to discover how they interact with one another. In some ways every project is different, but in thissense every project is the same.

This week, you will work with your pairing partner Samara to develop afunctional prototype of a music video recommendations system. Theinitial feature set does not need to be perfectly polished; it justneeds to be useful enough to collect feedback from people who may findthe product interesting.