I already posted this to the link-blog yesterday, but it’s so good it’s worth promoting more widely. If you write software for a living, you really ought to read the slides for Michael Schwern’s excellent ‘What Works In Software Development’ talk.
It’s a long presentation (108 slides!), but during the course of that, he covers:
- effective teamwork
- dealing with bad customers
- dealing with bad management
- classic coding mistakes
- classic project management mistakes
- classic design mistakes
- test-driven development
- refactoring
- patterns
It’s a really good synthesis of what I think are the best bits of good OO design, XP, CPAN and perl’s design and coding styles, without most of the cruft. I’ll be pointing people at this for years to come, I think…
(Found via yoz.)