Book Reviews @Gloo.ng
What’s in a book?….
What do I intend to get out of this book?……
How does this book help my person and/or career?
These are some of the many questions that probe our decision on the choice of books that we read.
Being a Software Developer in a “tech” world that is ever evolving makes it even more of an important factor to consider — being that one computing tool, framework, library, or knowledge that trends today might not be widely accepted or used in a few months or years to come all because a new kid is on the block.
Howbeit, Knowledge gained is never wasted but transferred to suit changing scenarios.
Here at Gloo.ng, we have a culture of reviewing books on a weekly basis. This is geared towards developer’s personal development, team bonding, and succcint knowledge transfer among the team.
I’ll go ahead to list some of the books we have reviewed so far:
— You Don’t Know JS (Really, do you?)
— The Pragmatic Programmer
How do we do this?
1. We often times, collectively create a pool of books (read list) that cut across various technological fields and approaches, and are relevant to our scope of work.
This gives each member of the team an opportunity to research on subject areas and/or propose books they find interesting and beneficial to the team.
2. We eventually agree on what book to read and how long we would be reading for, based on our short/long term plans, then reading gets underway.
3. Thereafter, we look forward to weekly TGIFs — our book review days!
What happens during Reviews?
Team members anticipate 17:00hrs that signals the end of the day’s work and the beginning of the week’s book review which typically lasts between 30 minutes to an hour. Our team lead or any other designated person usually introduces the Chapter or section under review and gets the ground rolling.
Thoughts, assumptions, inferences and deductions arising from the book become the hour’s deliberations.
Awkward moments ensue when you alone (in your head) figure out that you haven’t been doing something right all the while.
Likewise, you discover that some practice(s) you have adopted which didn’t seem like a big deal is actually applauded or commended in a section of the book, then, you start feeling like a super hero.
Is Knowledge actually Gained or Are We Wasting Time?
Truth be told: YES, we are changing our views and getting better at what we do and how we do them, and NO, we haven’t been wasting our time.
I’ll give you an example:
As Developers, how often are we aware of the Principle of Least Privilege in writing our codes, no matter how insignificant in function that line of code may be?
This principle states that in the design of software, such as an API (Application Programming Interface) for a module, you should expose very little of what is necessary, and hide all other stuff. This technique involves hiding variables and functions by enclosing them in the scope of a function.
But we still find a lot of developers write codes exposing every detail that there is.
Let’s take a look at these two functions, they basically do same thing but are designed differently:
Scenario 1// I have a function "iLearntYouAteTheMeat" that tells me that George ate the meat without having to let him know who told me about it.// This function returns 'true' as the result but keeps the identity of the informant anonymous.
function iLearntYouAteTheMeat() {
var whistleBlower = function beatriceToldMeSo() {
console.log('I caught George red handed');
}
return true;
}iLearntYouAteTheMeat(); Scenario 2// The function "iLearntYouAteTheMeat" tells me that George ate the meat but also lets him know who told me about it.// This function returns 'true' as the result and it reveals too much of the identity of the informant.
function iLearntYouAteTheMeat() {
if(whistleBlower) {
return true;
}
}var whistleBlower = function beatriceToldMeSo() {
console.log('I caught George red handed');
}iLearntYouAteTheMeat();
As seen above, little and important details could easily be ignored in the course of our professional and personal work but good book reviews always come to the rescue — acting as a reminder and fore-teller of good standards.
There’s a saying that goes this way:
“ If you want to hide anything from an African man, put it in a book.”
But I hope that you don’t want to be that “African man”. So get yourself and your team reading and reviewing some good books..
