The focus of this book by Sam Lightstone is helping you become a great software development professional. Career advancement is important, but secondary. Using a mix of interviews, commentary, and advice, this book exposes and explores the principles and values that support professionalism and even craftsmanship.
Tony Wong, a project management blackbelt, enumerates some practical points on individual procutivity. This article wonders how well these apply to software development and contrasts his list with that of other lists.
Although many products and solutions increasingly leverage software as an essential fundament, software engineers are becoming a rare species in Western countries. The problem with scarce availability of well-educated software engineers is that many companies require more engineers then they can get and if that gap widens, this could damage the leading edge of some companies.
According to careertrack.com the best rated job in 2011 is Software Engineer, at least in the US. 200 professions across various industries, skill levels, and salaries have been surveyed to calculate the ranking which is determined by taking the work environment, physical demands, outlook, income and stress into account.
In recent blog posting Dan North, well known expert for software engineering and employee of DRW Trading, explains his rejection to the Manifesto for Software Craftmanship. This posting raised some immediate responses in the community and among the readers of the blog. According to Dan 20000 people visited his blog and 150 people left comments.
A unique university program of education in software and systems design has been restarted at New Mexico Highlands University. The program is based on experiential learning, features apprenticeships, and uses a radically restructured and accelerated curriculum. The program goal: "to produce a community of professionals capable of solving complex, "wicked," problems with computing technology.
The rocky job market of the last couple years has left many people looking for work. Agile software development is appealing to many job seekers, but not all jobs are alike. If you want a job in Agile software development, using a framework like Scrum, you need a plan of action that spans all three phases of your job search: reseach/preparation, interviewing, and assessing your opportunities.
In this presentation made during QCon 2007, Dave Thomas talks about expanding people's expertise in their domains of interest by not treating them uniformly as they had the same amount of knowledge and level of experience.
Dave Hoover tells his story of becoming a software developer why he wrote Apprenticeship Patterns for those new to the development world. He gives a couple of examples of the patterns in his books and how he sees readers benefiting from the information in the book.
