Noel Rappin Writes Here

20 some-odd years ago, when I was a graduate student, I spent about two years building Mac applications using a language called Prograph. You’ve likely never heard of it. I want to explain why I’m still kind of obsessed with it. I’ve spent a lot of the intervening 20 years explaining to people why it was great. I’ve I’ve been capable of delivering this as a lightning talk at the drop of a hat at any time in the past ten years.

These are a director’s notes on my talk “The Developer’s Toolkit”, you can also watch the video here. It has sources for all the tools mentioned in the talk, and a little commentary that didn’t quite fit in. Hope this is helpful: General References Small, Sharp, Software Tools by Brian Hogan is still in beta but looks to be a good reference to Unix command line things. Which still can be useful, even if I don’t think they are the be-all and end-all.

Truinboy: https://flic.kr/p/5pkYiv Everybody in the Ruby community says they love pair programming. We often use it as a proxy for the awesomeness of a developer shop. Developer candidates regularly ask me if we pair as part of their attempt to determine if we know what we are doing. I wish we’d cut that out. Pairing is not a proxy for how good a development shop is. Pairing is also not, in my experience, a great tool for increasing team productivity and code quality.

2017 Books A Plenty At long last, the 2017 books that made me happy/recommendations post. Did you miss me? Past years: 2016 Part 1 Part Two 2015 Part 1 Part Two 2014 SF Fantasy This year, I’m doing it all in one post, because if you are going to write 4000 words it’s best to get it all in at once, that’s just science. The rules are: These are all books I read in 2017 That I liked The books are organized into arbitrary groups, because there were weird coincidences, in that I read a number of say, unusual time-travel books this year.