Inspirational reading material

I've been reading a lot of books during the last few years ... it feels like I've stumpled upon a huge pile of books, that all seem really important for me to read. Every time I finish a book, the backlog of books in front of me has grown with 3-5 books, that I simply must read. Articles as well are piling up, and it sometimes strikes me, that maybe I am not going to catch up - maybe I am going to have to filter some of the books or articles away ... sigh ...

Anyway, I find all kinds of litterature a great source of inspiration, and therefore I spend a lot of time reading. Surprisingly (to me at least) most of the books I've read recently have turned out to be really great books. Books that made me think a lot about how I work and write software, books that have actually changed my ways of doing these things. When I experience these books having such an effect on me, it is hard for me to resist the temptation to share the knowledge I've attained.

So have made two lists for You to have a look at:

A few of the books I've enjoyed reading and

A few of the books I'm looking forward to reading

Currently I am reading Andy Hunts book Pragmatic Thinking and Learning, a very interesting book about how our minds work, how to improve our brainfunction, and how to attain higher levels of expertice. I hope to finish reading it in about a week, and then I'll post a more thorough review of it here.

How much time do we have?

To night I saw a movie called School Of Life, featuring Ryan Reynolds as an off-the-charts charismatic school teacher. The movie was "above average", but the thing that stuck with me afterwards was this motto Ryan had in the movie. He asked his pupils rhetorically: "How much time do we have?", and he answered the question: "Not a lot!" His point was, that with only a limited time in this life, you better really make every moment count.

Now how does this relate to software development?

Well, my thoughts were along the lines of: Take pride in your work, and make sure you produce high quality software every day.

While this makes sense, I suddenly realized that this motto can be seen as a recommendation of agile development: With only a limited time before the deadline of the project, make sure you spend you time working on the most important things at all times.

This is part of the definition of most agile methodologies, and in my humble opinion, the most significant one. The fact that the customer knows, that we as developers always focus on the customer's top priority tasks, is what it's all about!

That is how we get the customer to buy into the agile way of running projects.

That is how we make sure, that the customer ends up with a system, that works the way the customer wants, and that the end users will enjoy using.

That is how we as vendors will gain customer satisfaction, repeat business and success in the market.

So if you are using a non-agile methodology, I'd say it's about time to begin looking into topics like agile, Scrum, TDD / BDD, etc.

We don't have much time, so we better make it count!