Personal Blog by a Software Dev from Berlin
Reading “Docs for Developers” is part of a larger theme for me in trying to create better documentation for the software products I’m working on. Going into the specifics that triggered this would go into too much depth here, but the major questions I’m currently asking myself in this area are: How can documentation be kept better up-to-date in a large team? How do I mitigate the curse of knowledge and find out what I need to document for others?
A recommendation for “Flow Architectures” by James Urquhart crossed my Twitter stream a few months ago. With a topic in relation to streaming and event-driven architectures it was an instant buy for me. I have been interested in what is called “Flow” here, since first hearing about CQRS and event sourcing some years ago. I believe there is a very logical benefit in storing events over, in essence, a snapshot of data at a point in time, like most systems do today.
When looking at books about Domain-Driven Design, the two most prominent are the original “blue book” (Domain-Driven Design by Eric Evans or DDD for short) and the “red book” (Implementing Domain-Driven Design by Vaughn Vernon or IDDD for short). I own both of them, but only read “the original” DDD so far (in my defense, each of them has more than 500 pages). I recently came across Domain-Driven Design Distilled (so, err, DDDD?
Several years ago I read the four introductory chapters of the 1st edition of Martin Fowlers classic Refactoring and, as recommended by the author, only briefly skimmed the catalog of refactorings. Against the authors recommendation, I rarely looked into it afterwards though and mainly got my refactoring fix online from the great catalog at sourcemaking.com. With the recent 2nd edition of Refactoring I took a different approach and read it cover to cover.
“The Soul of a New Machine” by Tracy Kidder is the next entry in my attempt to learn more about computing history after recently reading Michael Willams’ “A History of Computing Technology”. Writing a review about a book that has already won the Pulitzer prize in 1982 could be somewhat futile considering the reach of my page and the myriads of reviews that this book has likely garnered. I’d still like to write down some thoughts about it though, even if they are just for me.
One of my goals with this blog is to practice my writing skill. As a non-native English speaker I have gone through years and years of school English, but that’s been nearly half a lifetime ago and when it comes to grammar or punctuation rules I could have paid more attention to be honest. I additionally believe, that acquiring a writing style requires a lot of time and is hard to train in school.
With this book I can truly say that I finally took the time to read it. I can’t tell the exact year of purchase anymore, but it must have been at least ten years on my Tsundoku pile. It did already have one purpose though, for some years it served me well to prop up my laptop a few centimeters. Looking back at the history of things, even in such a young industry as computing, is often worthwhile in my opinion.
I’ve been following Zeynep Tufekci on Twitter for a while now and especially liked her recent coverage on Covid-19 for The Atlantic. Because of these articles I looked more into her background and noticed that she has also written a book: “Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protests”. With the current reemergence of the #BlackLivesMatter protests and the too-many-to-list-here political developments and scandals in recent years, where “social” media was often involved, the title hooked me.