The care and feeding of software engineers (or, why engineers are grumpy)
This brilliant and enlivening article by Nicholas C. Zakas is a compelling tale of some of the key challenges in many working environments and projects involving software development. Recommended for developers and their managers alike!
No Silver Bullet – Essence and Accident in Software Engineering
A seminal paper by Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., highlighting some of the erroneous assumptions about potential productivity and tooling improvements which still permeate parts of the IT industry.
http://faculty.salisbury.edu/~xswang/Research/Papers/SERelated/no-silver-bullet.pdf
The Leprechauns of Software Engineering
“How folklore turns into fact and what to do about it” reads the tagline on the book website, and it is just that: an excellent analysis and exposition of some of the many myths, memes, and mental viruses which are handed from IT professional to IT professional – and often so without any investigation of their scientific background.
https://leanpub.com/leprechauns
Brainpickings.org
One of my all-time favourites on the interwebs is Brain Pickings, an absolutely stunning and beautiful piece of intellectual and humanistic work; uniting arts, philosophy, psychology and other sciences into “(…) a record of my own becoming as a person — intellectually, creatively, spiritually — and an inquiry into how to live and what it means to lead a good life.” as the author Maria Popova writes it. An inquiry that continuously inspires and fascinates.
Design Matters
Design Matters is a wonderful podcast series that describes “(…) the broader world of creative culture, featuring wide-ranging and deep conversations with celebrated designers, artists, writers, musicians, and other luminaries” (in the words of Maria Popova).
http://debbiemillman.com/design_matters.html (more information) and https://soundcloud.com/designmatters (SoundCloud)
The IBM SAGE promotional video
In the 1950s, MIT and IBM was up to something truly awe-inspiring; namely the design, development, and deployment of an air defence system named “Semi-Automatic Ground Environment” (SAGE), which is one of the biggest IT projects ever undertaken.
I first watched the promotional IBM film around 2008 and it still continues to impress me. What a fantastic feat!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semi-Automatic_Ground_Environment
Good Math
Mark Chu-Carroll, a PhD computer scientist with a flair for captivating storytelling on math topics (and the author of the blog “Good Math/Bad Math”), has written the book “Good Math”, which is a “(…) guide to some of the most intriguing topics from two thousand years of mathematics.”. For those seeking to explore and understand the inner meaning behind numbers, “Good Math” is certainly a worthwhile read.
Visit the blog (http://www.goodmath.org/blog/) and the booksite (https://pragprog.com/book/mcmath/good-math).
Interested in math? Also check out “Learning How to Learn” and TBD for more excellent resources.
Learning How to Learn
TBD.