Extreme programming explained

What Hacker News says

1. KerrickDec 2025
   Cal Newport, So Good They Can't Ignore You. This book convinced me to stop widening my skillset by beginning again, and start doubling down on my strengths.

   Gene Kim et al., The Phoenix Project. This book reinvigorated my love for management, which I lost in 2021–2022. I'm still an IC, but I decided to stop refusing management roles.

   Kent Beck, Extreme Programming Explained, 2nd Edition. This book lit a fire under my ass to figure out better ways of working. I followed it up with the next one in a book club at work.

   James Shore et al., The Art of Agile Software Development, 2nd Edition. This book gave me hope that a productive, humanist, productivity-oriented workflow can work in today's software world. I read it with my teammates in a book club at work, including the software engineers, QA tester, product owners, and UX designer. Unfortunately the rest of my team had little interest in putting it into place where I work.

   Robert C. Martin,

   Clean Architecture. This book was a delightful read. Uncle Bob weaved practical advice together with stories from his past that served both to illustrate his points and to entertain. While I don't agree with every word in the book (e.g. Screaming Architecture), I still recommend it to every Senior+ Software Engineer.

   Eric Evans,

   Domain-Driven Design: Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software. Aside from its amazing content, this book has some of the best typesetting I've ever seen. I sought out a font that is a match (or near-match) and reverse-engineered the letter spacing, line height, heading font sizes, etc. Its content was great too, but I was glad to have read Vaughn Vernon's DDDD first.

   Vaughn Vernon,

   Domain-Driven Design Distilled. This book followed up Shore's work in our book club at work. Everybody on the team really liked what they read, but nobody felt like they had actionable insights. So the engineers went on to read Vernon's IDDD, and the non-engineers read Adzic's IM and Patton's USM.

   Vaughn Vernon,

   Implementing Domain-Driven Design. I read this book with a book club at work. While Evans's work was well-grounded in theory and left a lot of interpretation in the patterns behind DDD, Vernon is a practical, nuts-and-bolts DIY guide to one approach to DDD. Luckily, these tactics resonated with my team and our codebase has seen marked improvements in the past few months. I'm looking forward to our process catching up so we can do more than "DDD Lite."

   Jeff Patton,

   User Story Mapping. This book was fun, practical, and completely outside any way I'd ever worked. It also helped me understand exactly why I've failed every time I tried to make my own SaaS startup on nights and weekends.

   Gojko Adzic,

   Impact Mapping. This book was basically a pamphlet. The process seems...good? But since I'm no longer in a role with the influence or authority to recommend product direction, I doubt I'll get much use out of this for a while.

   Tanya Reilly,

   The Staff Engineer's Path. This book wants to follow in the footsteps of Camille Fournier's The Manager's Path, but it seemed less specific and useful as a roadmap. Perhaps that's because of how different "Staff Engineer" is from company to company, at least when compared to the roles covered by Fournier. But it did help me earn my promotion to* Staff Engineer, so it was clearly worth reading.

   Tamar Rosier, Your Brain's Not Broken. This book was the second I read after I got diagnosed with adult ADHD. I appreciated that it helped me de-stigmatize, because I harbored some bummer feelings when I realized no actually I didn't grow out of it. It also helped me reflect on my habits of action, and see them in a new light. I was surprised to see how much of my anger and frustration in life was a coping mechanism to help me get things done. I've had a much calmer life since recognizing that.

   Alexander Tarlinder, Developer Testing. I'm not quite finished with this book, but I'll be done by the end of the year. It's been a great overview of automated testing from the perspective of a programmer. It helped refresh my memory on things I knew but forgot. It filled gaps that I had in my baseline knowledge. It corrected things I "knew" but was slightly incorrect about. I now recommend this to any programmer, whether or not they've got a habit of testing.

   Austin Kleon's trilogy: Steal Like An Artist, Show Your Work, Keep Going. These books were cute, full of incredibly quotable passages, and fun to read. I didn't spend enough time on them, though. A lot of the lessons I thought I'd learned left my brain like water through a sieve.

   Kent Beck, Tidy First?. This book helped me understand the economics of software through a new light. That was important to me, because during the time I spent as a Director of Software Engineering I was not given a budget and asked to manage the department's expenses.

   Antonio Cangiano, Technical Blogging, 2nd Edition. This book convinced me to start a blog. It was going really well, and then I shrank back from it due to fear of vulnerability. Since I got over those fears and started blogging again, it's been a lot of fun again. I incorporated what would've been tweets into the blog (as "quick posts") in addition to my longer-form, less-ephemeral content (as "articles"). Writing has been a great way to solidify what I've learned and distill my opinions. Heck, I should migrate this comment to my blog.

   I also read other books (especially on my journey to becoming a magician), but these were the ones I thought Hacker News might be most interested in.

   Show morethread
2. KerrickMar 2025
   Read books. Like, a lot of them.

   Start with Make It Stick (Brown et al.). Apply what this book teaches you to every one afterwards.

   Next, read and work through Exercises for Programmers (Hogan) and A Common Sense Guide to Data Structures and Algorithms (Wengrow).

   After you finish those two, read The Missing README (Riccomini et al.) and Extreme Programming Explained (Beck et al.). These two books provide very different viewpoints into the stuff that isn’t coding in a programming job.

   Assuming you’re using an OO language, follow that up with Object-Oriented Analysis and Design with Applications (Booch et al.) and Object Thinking. They contrast each other quite a bit; having both perspectives is handy.

   Once you’re through all those, I recommend Tidy First (Beck), Implementation Patterns (Beck), and Test-Driven Development By Example (Beck). These three books of his provide an incredibly accessible view into better ways to code.

   If you’re anything like me you get bored reading one book for too long. I’ve found that having a second book going that I can switch to is great for that. A parallel track with The Pattern On the Stone (Hillis), The Pragmatic Programmer (Thomas & Hunt), The Mythical Man-Month (Brooks), and How Computers Really Work (Justice) provides a reprieve and some technical and cultural context.

   Show morethread
3. ryan-duveJan 2024
   Parent commenter said "basically" have 100% test coverage, and I'm not sure what is meant by that. From the text[0]:

   > Any program feature without an automated test simply doesn't exist. Programmers write unit tests so that their confidence in the operation of the program can be part of the program itself. Customers write functional tests so that their confidence in the operation of the program can become part of the program, too. The result is a program that becomes more and more confident over time -- it becomes more capable of accepting change, not less.

   > You don't have to write a test for every single method you write, only production methods that could possibly break. Sometimes you just want to find out if something is possible. You go explore for half an hour. Yes, it is possible. Now you throw away your code and start over with tests.

   [Emphasis mine.]

   I can see how this is interpreted both ways, so I'll leave it to you. For what it's worth, I found the book to be an easier read than most books on coding practices.

   [0] Extreme Programming Explained by Kent Beck, Chapter 10 under "Testing"

   Show morethread
4. belfalasJan 2023
   Many more beyond this but these are my for sures.

   People / Soft Skills:

   * How to win friends and Influence People - Dale Carnegie

   * Secrets of Consulting - Gerald Weinberg

   * Peopleware - Tom DeMarco & Timothy Lister

   * Nurtured by Love - Shinici Suzuki

   * Turn the Ship Around! - David Marquet

   * Never Split the Difference - Chris Voss

   http://dhemery.com/articles/resistance_as_a_resource/

   http://dhemery.com/articles/managing_yourself_through_change...

   Macro Skills:

   * Toyota Production System - Taiichii Ohno

   * Workplace Management - Taiichii Ohno

   * Thinking in Systems - Donella Meadows

   * Fifth Discipline - Peter Senge

   Agile:

   * Extreme Programming, Explained (2nd ed.) - Kent Beck (the annotated bibliography is a goldmine)

   * Chaos: Making a New Science - James Gleick

   Programming:

   * Implementation Patterns - Kent Beck

   * Test-Driven Development, By Example - Kent Beck

   * Refactoring (both editions) - Martin Fowler

   * Refactoring to Patterns - Joshua Kerievsky

   * Practical Object Oriented Design - Sandi Metz

   * Functional Programming in Scala - Chiusano & Bjarnason

   * Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided By Tests - Freeman & Pryce ("The Goose Book")

   * Modern Java in Action - Raoul-Gabriel Urma

   * Java Concurrency in Practice - Brian Goetz

   * Grokking Algorithms - Aditya Y. Bhargava

   Architecture:

   * Righting Software - Juval Lowy

   * Release It! - Michael Nygard

   * Site Reliability Engineering - Beyer, et al. ("The SRE Book”)

   * Domain Driven Design - Eric Evans

   * Introduction to Permaculture - Bill Mollison and Mia Slay

   * Fun with a Pencil - Andrew Loomis

   Design:

   * All books by Edward Tufte, especially “The visual display of quantitative information”

   * The Elements of Typographic Style - Robert Bringhurst

   * Understanding Comics - Scott McCloud

   * Design of Everyday Things - Don Norman

   * Notes on the Synthesis of Form - Christopher Alexander

   * The Timeless Way of Building - Christopher Alexander

   Show morethread
5. summertime42Dec 2022
   I have all of these on my shelf. Fantastic reads.

   * Extreme Programming Explained by Kent Beck

   * Clean Code and The Clean Coder by Robert C. Martin

   * Soft Skills by John Sonmez (1st edition)

   * Pragmatic Programmer by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas

   * Working Effectively with Legacy Code by Michael Feathers

   * The Mythical Man-Month by Frederick Brooks

   (Selfish plug) Additionally, I wrote my own book concerning the entire industry, from just starting out to becoming a self employed consultant when you get sick of fulltime work - all soft skills from my decade or so of the industry, as well - https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B43V1JJW

   Show morethread
6. bwh2Oct 2022
   I have a big list on my website at https://www.briansnotes.io/books/ but here are a few:

     * The DevOps Handbook - Lots of tactics for improving the productivity and effectiveness of engineering teams
     * Extreme Programming Explained - Solid guide to agile ideas
     * Staff Engineer and The Manager's Path - Helps you understand your career path and the expectations that come with positions like Tech Lead, Staff Engineer, Engineering Manager, etc.

   Show morethread