So it’s now been two weeks since my last post committing to a daily post about what I’ve been reading. I went on vacation to Bear Lake for a family reunion that was great fun except for the bad sunburn I got. I’ll have to tell you sometime about my bad burn from ‘91 (Florida).
Anyway, I did manage to get chapter 3 of Code Complete read at some point during the vacation. I was half-surprised by how much of McConnell’s advice parallels the agile principles that are so popular currently, given that it was written about 15 years ago. While the focus is still on waterfall development the value of iterations is recognized and the need for using development practices that “accomodate changes.” I did get a kick out of how many of the questions in the checklists are things that might not even be considered up front by many agilists nowadays. The most dated section was the section on programming languages, with no real discussion of modern programming languages like Java, C#, or any functional languages. I’ll have to go get me a copy of the second edition.