Three practical articles, two practical books

Here's a nifty ad-hoc collection of some nice practical articles and books to keep you grounded and focused on what really matters:

• First, a nice review of Robert C. ("Uncle Bob") Martin's The Clean Coder: 9 things I learned from reading The Clean Coder by Robert C. Martin, on how professional developers conduct themselves . I haven't read the book (yet), but the review makes me interested enough to keep this book on the list for when I'm next above water on my technical reading. An excerpt from Christoffer Pettersson's review:

  As a professional developer, you should spend time caring for your profession. Just like in any other profession, practice gives performance, skill and experience.

  It is your own responsibility to keep training yourself by reading, practicing and learning - actually anything that helps you grow as a software developer and helps you get on board with the constant industry changes.

• Second, a nifty essay by Professor John Regehr about the ins and outs of "testcase reduction", one of those rarely-discussed but ultra-important skills that gets far too little recognition. At my day job, I'm lucky to have a colleague who is just astonishingly good at testcase reduction; he just has the knack. An excerpt from Regehr's essay:

  testcase reduction is both an art and a science. The science part is about 98% of the problem and we should be able to automate all of it. Creating a test case from scratch that triggers a given compiler bug is, for now at least, not only an art, but an art that has only a handful of practitioners.

• Third, a nice article on Ned Batchelder's blog about "Maintenance Hatches", those special visibility hooks that let humans observe the operation of complex software in some high-level and comprehensible fashion, for diagnosis and support purposes. In my world, these hatches are typically trace logs, which cause the software to emit detailed information about its activity, and can be turned on and off, and ratcheted up to higher or lower levels, as needed. I like Batchelder's terminology, which conjures up the image of opening a cover to the machinery to observe it at work:

  On a physical machine, you need to be able to get at the inner workings of the thing to observe it, fiddle with it, and so on. The same is true for your software.

• Fourth, an interesting online book about the practicalities of building a modern web application: The Twelve-Factor App. I guess I was sold when I saw the first factor was to ensure you are using a source code control system (may I recommend one?). From the introduction to the book:

  This document synthesizes all of our experience and observations on a wide variety of software-as-a-service apps in the wild. It is a triangulation on ideal practices app development, paying particular attention to the dynamics of the organic growth of an app over time, the dynamics of collaboration between developers working on the app’s codebase, and avoiding the cost of software erosion.

• Last, but far from least, check out this amazing online book about graphics programming: Learning Modern 3D Graphics Programming by Jason McKesson. From the introduction:

  This book is intended to teach you how to be a graphics programmer. It is not aimed at any particular graphics field; it is designed to cover most of the basics of 3D rendering. So if you want to be a game developer, a CAD program designer, do some computer visualization, or any number of things, this book can still be an asset for you.

The Internet is a wonderful place; so much stuff to read and explore!