#coder radio

Here’s what I’m reading, watching, and listening to related to programming and software development as 2017 begins. I highly recommend checking out each of these works. 

Coder Radio

While I was commuting 40 minutes each way to my prior day job I employed a multitude of listening strategies beyond music to make that ambient time worthwhile. I zoomed through audio books, spent an ill-advised stint in 2014 guiltily listening to 104.3 The Fan, and regularly tuned into NPR. But, my favorite way to invest that valuable windshield time was to listen to podcasts, primarily those of the sporting and political variety. 

So, to continue learning while driving, walking, and riding the trainer I went on the hunt for a great programming podcast. I found it on my first try, thanks to this post: https://medium.com/@RobbCode/the-5-podcasts-that-have-helped-me-become-a-better-software-developer-b4fc1da3da6d#.6sht04k9m

The hosts of Coder Radio, Chris and Michael, showcase the breadth and depth of their experience by providing well-formulated and informed opinions on the latest tech news and how the newest trends affect life as a programmer. I started listening in early December and of late they’ve been analyzing the personal assistant space, test driving Google Home and Amazon’s Echo in an attempt to predict how useful these devices will actually be and which one will achieve prominence among developers and why. 

Podcasts are a perfect medium for getting nuance and humor across while also being informative and entertaining in an easily-digestible amount of time. Coder Radio checks all the boxes, and it’s the perfect audio supplement to the developer’s weekly diet of written content. 

Chaos Monkeys by Antonio García Martínez

I was gifted this book over the holidays and I haven’t been able to put it down since the calendar turned. García Martínez provides what I can only imagine to be one of the most frank, open, and detailed accountings in existence of how the sausage in Silicon Valley gets made. 

I’m just over halfway through and the experience has been eye-opening, to say the least. García Martínez paces the narrative at a quick clip and uses his experience navigating a startup through the twisting forest of Valley giants to demonstrate what it takes to make it big in tech. Along the way he develops a sharp picture of the absurd circumstances under which many of the forces molding our world have taken shape. 

While his experience is certainly unique, and he is brash and at times insane both by nature and by design, there’s plenty to be gleaned from his ambitious tale of entrepreneurship for anyone who works in tech and is contemplating the trajectory of their career. 

Perhaps the most useful piece of advice I’ve found thus far involves making oneself as prepared as humanly possible. García Martínez makes it clear early and often that a significant portion of the success he finds is due to his ability to read people and situations, and that ability largely stems from his preparation and research. He always does his due diligence and then some. Knowledge is power and this remains true in any walk of life. 

This book is a rollicking, sometimes inspiring, sometimes baffling, and ultimately fascinating account of Silicon Valley machinations. It’s a must-read for anyone who is thinking about working, or has worked, in a startup environment. 

The Pragmatic Programmer by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas

While attending CodeCraft last summer I began looking for a textbook, of sorts, that could provide some more depth and background to the actual practice of programming. I wasn’t searching for anything technical, there are plenty of those types of texts in existence and most questions are more easily answered by reading the docs, finding blog posts, or quickly heading over to Stack Overflow. 

I wanted something along the lines of On Being a Photographer by David Hurn and Bill Jay, a philosophical guidepost which I had read and kept close in a previous life as a photojournalism student. 

I found The Pragmatic Programmer listed atop several reading list posts and after going over reviews that spoke in reverential tones I procured my own gently used copy a couple of weeks ago. (I think it’s out of print at this point but I’m not entirely sure.) 

So far, through the first two sections, I’ve found what I was looking for. Hunt and Thomas provide a practical guide on how to work and live as a programmer that applies to any form of software development. It’s a great mix of philosophy and real-world advice on how to go about achieving clean and efficient code and how to put forth your best work. 

It’s one of those manuals that you can pick up and read from any spot and it’s structured in way that makes it easy to highlight the passages that are most relevant to you. It also holds up exceedingly well for having first been published in 1999. Technologies and languages evolve at a blistering pace but the strategies for how to craft and work with them remain largely the same. 

Some segments are certainly more applicable than others but I’m sure that this guide will prove to be a continually useful reference over the coming years, as I’m sure it has for multitudes of others. 

Lastly, as I continue to develop ForeCaddie in Angular 2 I’ve found a couple of great tutorials on Udemy covering development in the MEAN stack. (For those who may not know, MEAN stands for MongoDB, Express, Angular, and Node.)

The courses are titled Angular 2 - The Complete Guide and Angular 2 and NodeJS - The Practical Guide to MEAN Stack Development and are both created by Maximillian Schwarzmüller, a freelance web developer and consultant. 

Schwarzmüller does a great job of clearly and concisely building up concepts and walking through crucial aspects of putting together a MEAN stack application within the Angular 2 framework. So far, I’d recommend each of these video courses, which contain over 24 hours of video combined, both if you’re just starting out in Angular 2 or interested in delving deeper and reinforcing your knowledge.