hchalkley.blog

In parallel to the job-hunting process, I have recently been broadening my knowledge of a variety of different aspects of software development, both through on-line browsing, and reading real, hardcopy books. Most of what I have logged here so far have been brief notes about on-line discoveries, but I want to particulary single out Alistair Cockburn's book Agile Software Development which is one of the best reads of all the technical books I have read recently. It gives a clear explanation of why some of the classic software development methodologies cannot guarantee project success, and argues that the most reliable predictor of team sucess is the team's ability to communicate and cooperate.
The other book that's impressed me recently is Terry Winograd's Bringing Design to Software, whcih is an anthology of papers written by designers in a variety of fields, showing how the ideas of conventional product design, architecture and so on can be applied to the design of software user interfaces.