Over the last nine months or so, I have done virtually no coding of any kind. A new baby, two new jobs, and a new house threw whatever routines I thought I had right out of the moving car, leaving them to roll, choke, and die of dehydration on the side of the road. Things have settled down a bit over the last month, and it's time to get back to business.
I am starting a new project: 500 hours of php.
One of the key points of modern software development is to automate everything that can be automated. Do not waste time on repeatedly performing a task that a machine can do. Convincing developers and managers to invest in the culture and infrastructure that supports a high level of automation can sometimes be very daunting. This book does a great job of outlining and explaining the different challenges and advantages that working with continuous integration can expose. It is a very informative and entertaining read.
This album didn't hit me very hard at first, but the levels of talent and artistry shown by the musicians on this album keep bringing me back to it. It's produced by Daniel Lanois, a musician for whom I have the utmost respect. I wish Lanois was a household name, but producers never get the credit they deserve. Most people have heard of The Beatles but never their producer. Daniel Lanois is right up there with Sir George Henry Martin.
I'm about two hundred pages into this book, and it has been fun so far. When the authors say "Absolute Beginners," they mean it. This book does a pretty good job of spoon-feeding the reader, which is nice for me because for whatever reason, this material has been hard for me to absorb. I flipped ahead a bit, and the book is lacking substance in one particular area. Where's the part about making $1,000,000,000,000,000 dollars on the AppStore?