Jun 07 2011

Questions to ask the prospective employer

Category: Uncategorizedzvolkov @ 2:15 pm
  • Is the team dedicated to single product? How many “projects” (independent timelines) are there for the team?
  • The product(s) that you develop, where do they get deployed and by whom?
  • Do you provide production support (troubleshooting, hot fixes)? How does that work?
  • What’s your source control branching policy? Do you follow the mainline model with maintenance branches / feature branches?
  • How flexible is your working hours? Do you allow working from home?
  • Do you use any legacy software / tools?
  • Are there projects in use not covered by unit-tests?
  • What is your dress code?
  • What is the escalation path for technical debates / conflicts? For business (schedule / scope / priority) conflicts?
  • How do you track bugs? How do bugs triaged / tracked / resolved?
  • Is blogging / tweeting allowed on corporate time?
  • What kind of work stations developers have (RAM, Number of monitors)
  • How much overtime is typically expected per week?
  • What is the policy for purchasing a development tool (Resharper, BeyondCompare etc.)?
  • What training and improvement opportunities the company provides (free time, books, dev conferences, in house training)?
  • Do you practice Continuous Integration (in the narrow sense of running builds off of checkins)?
  • Would I have admin rights on my development workstation?


Jun 06 2011

Books

Category: Uncategorizedzvolkov @ 11:36 am
  1. Unit-Testing
    • The Art of Unit Testing
    • Growing Object-Oriented Software Guided by Tests
    • Working Effectively with Legacy Code
    • xUnit Test Patterns: Refactoring Test Code
  2. Professionalism and Craftmanship
    • Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship
    • The Clean Coder: A Code of Conduct for Professional Programmers
  3. Project management
    • Scrum and XP from the Trenches
    • Kanban, by David Anderson
    • Scrumban – Essays on Kanban Systems for Lean Software Development
    • Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams
    • The Mythical Man-Month
  4. Object Oriented Design
    • Design Patterns. Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software.
    • Head First Design Patterns
  5. Miscelaneous best practices
    • Agile Principles, Patterns, and Practices in C#
    • Brownfield Application Development in .Net
    • Foundations of Programming, by Karl Seguin
  6. .NET technology specific
    • C# in Depth, Second Edition
    • Illustrated C# 2010
    • Pro ASP.NET MVC 3 Framework
    • Inside the Microsoft Build Engine: Using MsBuild and Team Foundation Build
    • Applied Microsoft .NET Framework Programming
  7. Inspirational and mind expanding
    • Why’s (poignant) guide to Ruby
    • The Best Software Writing I: Selected and Introduced by Joel Spolsky
    • The Art of UNIX Programming
    • Seven Languages in Seven Weeks