The Software Craftsman

One my favorite book is The Software Craftsman by Sandro Mancuso. I was surprised right in the beginning that he worked for the UBS for several years which I also has connection to. The author also mentions names in the preface who I actually met years before. Maybe the world isn’t that big?

The book consists of more than a dozen chapters. Each of them is independent quite well from the others, so not a problem to read in burst mode. Easy to continue days or weeks later with a different chapter. The high number of chapters is the biggest benefit of the book. It discusses topics that no other book or literature does. Still, those aspects are also part of our business, part of a developer’s life.

Some topics that I especially loved. Right in the beginning, how the author explains the original idea behind Agile and how it went wrong is flawless. He was the one, who connected the dots for me between the “process-oriented Agile principles” and “technical-oriented Agile principles”. Due to the lack of the latter “many Agile projects are now, steadily, and iteratively, producing crap code”.

Other lovely chapters for me were the ones which were about our career, the attitude we should have, our behavior, recruitment, interviewing (both sides), morale, learning, not to mention many others.

What I liked the most

• The topics discussed by the book are extremely broad
• Many of them are never even mentioned by other literature

What I didn’t like much

• The author is not a native English speaker, sometimes this is reflected by the language he is using, kind of way too simple. Though this is a positive thing as well for an also not native English speaker, much faster to read.
• The reasonings most of the time are limited to TDD, pair programming, and maybe some others. As a fan of those, there is nothing wrong with them, but after a while, it was a bit boring to read the same expressions all over.