Weekend Reader, Week 30

SwissJS was Great!

Here are some good summaries:
- SwissJS 2015 - The JavaScript Conference To Meet and Socialise by nothing.ch
- Impressions of swissJS 2015 by Chaosmail Blog

History of Icons

A visual brief on icon history through different graphical user interfaces in different operating systems.
A neat site that reminds us how time is passing …

Startup Timelines

Another site that reminds us how time is passing …

Assessing Employee Performance: You’re Doing it Rong

Some interesting thoughts about tracking value and a lot of bashing of issue trackers.

Ironically, the best way to get fired for underperformance is to be a 10x developer.

Feature Toggles are one of the worst kinds of Technical Debt

Feature toggles are a (better) alternative to excessive feature branching, but guess what, they have their own problems … so we keep looking for the silver bullet.

Why you might not need MVC

React.js was critizising MVC from the beginning. I never understood the argumentation against MVC, 2-way-binding and the need for the Flux architecture. This article helped me to understand some of the concepts behind that argumentation.

The container revolution

A good writeup about how container technologies evolved and the consequences.

That means your developers can move faster, you can ship faster, you can iterate faster, your business grows faster – speed improves everything.

This Developers Life is back

After almost two years of silence they released a new episode … it does not top my favorite episode, but it’s well done.

The ??!??! operator in C

No joke: ??!??! is a valid operator in the C programming language …

Next Speaking Engagements

I will hold my workshop “JavaScript for real Developers: A survival Bootcamp” on September 1st at the “ch/open Workshoptage“.
I have been holding workshops at the “ch/open Workshoptage” for the last 9 years, and I think it is one of the best tech event in Switzerland.
It’s the third time I hold the “JavaScript for real Developers” workshop at the “ch/open Workshoptage” (but I have held the same content at many in-house trainings). The last two years the workshop was always fully booked in a short period of time.

Update July 31: The workshop is almost full, a re-run is scheduled.

I am proud that I was invited for the fifth time to speak at the annual SBB Developer Day on September 9th. I will give an introduction to TypeScript.

On August 3rd I will hold my course “Einführung in die Frontend-Entwicklung mit JavaScript und AngularJS” at DigiComp for the first time. The course is not yet fully booked, there is still time to register …

Weekend Reader, Week 29

The Software Paradox

A short book about the rise and fall of the commercial software market.

Product Backlog Bankruptcy!

I have been in teams where the effort to maintain (the illusion of) a backlog was just rediculous … the idea to declare the product backlog bankruptcy makes sense to me.

Agile & Scrum Go Mainstream

Ok, many teams in software development have moved past the scrum hype … but general management seems to just start discovering it.

Scrum is a Copernican revolution in management.

… I remain sceptical.

Monolith First

Martin Fowler about the current hype around microservices:

You shouldn’t start a new project with microservices, even if you’re
sure your application will be big enough to make it worthwhile.

Microservices and JavaEE: No paradox?

JavaEE desperately tries to be fashIonable by squeezing traditional application servers in the corset of microservices … I wonder if this is a good aproach:
- WildFly Swarm
- Payara Micro
- KumuluzEE

The birth and death of JavaScript

Another great talk (WAT is a classic!) by Gary Bernhard. Watch out for the point where he crosses from reality to fiction …

Some people seem pretty crazy

How Richard Stallman uses computers:

I usually fetch web pages from other sites by sending mail to a
program that fetches them, and then mails them back to me.

I am in awe at all the obstacles he is willing to take on by staying true to his principles.

Funny: Introducing Atom 1.0

Atom is the text editor from GitHub based on web-technologies.