Felix Crux

I’ve updated my recommended reading list for software professionals (introduced and explained here) with a new section on people and project management.

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I’ve just added a new section to my recommended reading list for software professionals (introduced and explained here). This new section covers the presentation of information, design, and user interfaces/experiences.

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I’ve started putting together a list of the “core” books I recommend for people interested in exploring different facets of our field. I certainly don’t think you need to read all of them to be a capable software professional; rather it is the list I would put together if asked about how to learn more about specific areas.

This list came about because after compiling similar lists two or three times over the years in various places and formats, I’m following good development practice and factoring it out for reuse and sharing.

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One of my favourite features of the Firefox web browser is surprisingly unknown and sadly underused. Keyword search bookmarks let you kick off a custom search of any site straight from the address bar (a.k.a. the “awesome bar”). For example, if you typed “w hedgehog”, you could go to the Wikipedia page for the little critters, or “img hedgehog” could show you a cute image search.

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…or at least the best one I’ve managed to come up with.

The venerable cron utility has some well-known shortcomings, chief among which is how difficult it is to monitor the health and output of scheduled tasks. The default setup tries to email output, but on a typical laptop, desktop workstation, or even on many servers, it’s common to not have a working system-wide mailer configuration. Many users therefore set up “wrapper” scripts that handle logging, time­stamping, and so forth. This is the best one I’ve managed to come up with.

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