Ivan’s agile thinkings

I like to think that one of my strengths is my willingness to pro-actively learn new things.  Recently I have been trying to learn about learning by reading the excellent Pragmatic Thinking and Learning by Andy Hunt of The Pragmatic Programmer fame (which remains one of my favourite books of all time).

A lot of the content in PTL wasn’t that new to me, as I have previously read several of the books that Andy has read and references from the text.  That said, I definitely learned new things and deepened my understanding about certain areas.

Constant learning is definitely a incredibly valuable thing, I look for it in every potential new hire I interview.  But continually learning in the same habitual way may not be the optimal strategy.  If you apply the agile development approaches to how we learn it suggests that you should retrospect at what works, what doesn’t and that we should be prepared to try different things to see if they work better (rinse and repeat).

Though I’m not a novice at learning, I am a novice at learning using new tools and techniques: when was the last time you learned how to learn in a new way?  So how do I move froward from here?  According to the book, what I need is some novice/advanced beginner handrails to hold whilst I improve.  Different to the other books that I have read around this subject, PTL brings a consolidated set of next-steps in the context of the life of a software developer.

This is the initial list of things I am going to start:

• Read more deliberately using the SQR3 technique, then blog about what I have learned.
  • Read PTL again, this time, read it deliberately.
  • Re-read Domain-Driven Design deliberately.
• Increase my blogging frequency – hopefully doing more often will make me quicker.
• Review my blog posts once in a while – do I still agree? what have I learned since?
• Try mindmaps again having deepened my understanding about how they might help me learn/understand.
  • Redraw mindmaps every now and then – let some mental mushing happen – see what my brain has subconsciously come up with.

Ever more things will come up as I continually learn and continually learn to learn.  I’m still on that journey that started the best part of 33 years ago and one that I hope doesn’t stop for a very long time yet.

On the way back from a long-weekend on Vancouver Island we had a little time to kill whilst waiting for our ferry home.  There was a Chapters store nearby, so that was an easy mascre of half and hour.  After browsing for a while and noting possible future purchases I purchased Objective-C Pocket Reference.  At 122 small pages it was a quick read and covered he basics of Objective-C’s syntax and detailed various fundamental aspects of the Cocoa and GNUStep and the various differences betwen them.

I got from it pretty much what I was hoping: an easily digestible introduction into Objective-C.  I had previously read a bunch on the web, but I always find reading books, rather than reading a screen, to be far more effective for myself.  I had many different questions answered from an attempted iPhone coding session a few months ago.

I have been nudging some of the guys at work to start an Objective-C/iPhone/Mac programming study group. This book will be very useful for the novices in the group (myself included) to quickly look up the fundamentals and work through the syntax impedance as they try and push a new language into their Java brains – this was definitely a sticking point with the Erlang study group we had for a while.

In summary, a great, concise reference – just like the title suggests.  It appears that the reviewers on Amazon also agree.

I’m constantly reading, watching or listening to stuff that makes me learn an I recently found the following very useful and timely for the work I’m doing at the moment (or in the near future).

• Dave Syer from Spring Source talking about Spring Batch – extracting the essential elements of batch processing Spring style.  If you have to write batch jobs in Java you could do a lot worse than use Spring Batch as a base.
  http://www.infoq.com/presentations/syer-introducing-spring-batch
• Mishkin Berteig on how using (incredibly short) 2 day Scrum iterations acted as a catalyst to make a business become more collaborative and better prioritise the work for their (rather small) IT department.  Eventually determining that the IT department shouldn’t have been working on any projects other than one that would make the company more money than the rest of the projects put together!
  http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Short-Iterations-Mishkin-Berteig 
• A friend of mine sent me a link to a very interesting talk by Mitch Lacey about how a Scrum project he was leading went very wrong – what happens when the business just doesn’t ‘get’ agile development.

  http://www.infoq.com/presentations/A-Story-of-Project-Failure-Mitch-Lacey

• Randy Shoup on the architecture of eBay – learn that data consistency doesn’t have to be 100% but you have to trade-off with availability and data partitioning – extremely illuminating.
  http://www.se-radio.net/podcast/2008-09/episode-109-ebay039s-architecture-principles-randy-shoup

About two months ago I stumbled on the Software Engineering Radio podcast, and in my opinion it’s one of the best techy podcasts out there (anyone knows any different?).

There are currently 107 podcasts available and the 13 I’ve listened to (and listened to again) have been worth their virtual weight in gold.  There are a lot of interviews about many, many topics and the interviewees really know there stuff.

SE-Radio is an invaluable resource for the professional software developer.