Reading Week

My ERP implementation (OK, it's my company's, not mine, but I have to work on it) is in a spot of trouble. At the moment, the team is waiting on a decision from the board of directors that will tell us whether we proceed with the work we've been doing for the past two years, or whether we scrap it all and implement a different system. We're all quite nervous, frankly, because the, uh, human resource requirements for the alternative system implementation are kind of undefined. Personally, though, I figure that there will be enough technical work to keep me busy.

Anyway, this period of waiting has given me a chance to do some reading. My wife, better than anyone, knows that I'm a huge geek and that she can best express her love for me by giving me geek gifts. For Valentine's Day, she took a look at my Amazon wish list and picked out The Pragmatic Programmer by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas. I haven't read it all yet, but what I have read has been fantastic. Nothing beats learning from other people's mistakes and experience.

I've also been refreshing my C programming skills. I guess I've been coding in C for close to 15 years now, but over the past few years I've been focused either on non-programming work like technical architecture and network design, or on Java and PL/SQL stuff. Somebody at the office left a college-level C textbook laying around so I worked through it and I think it was a worthwhile project. I probably wouldn't choose C for a programming project today -- I'd more likely choose Java or C++ -- but it's good to remember where the languages you use today came from.

Another source of reading material for me is The Rational Edge. Rational Software produces this free monthly e-zine and it never disappoints. One of this month's articles, A Software Development Process for a Team of One almost made me want to be a solo consultant again. Solid advice. Sure, it's a bit of a marketing tool, but I happen to believe in modern software engineering techniques and Rational makes some great stuff.