Mans.hu

Of life and all its colors

About everything that amazes and confounds me.

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Book Review: Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life

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This was a very eventful year for me with a lot of things going on in my personal and professional life. Throughout the year I felt bouts of anxiety on what’s to come next, and felt uneasy about the future. Eventually, the year turned out very well for me, and I was fortunate enough to receive the best outcome of all the paths that every aspect of life was taking. What’s interesting though is that my anxiety didn’t subside, it reduced from what it was, but it seemed like I had acquired this terrible habit of living in the future, and trying to predict what was to come, and quite often found myself down a rabbit-hole of worst case outcomes.

That was pretty much my trigger to buy a book on mindfulness, to try and learn to be present in the moment, and I think this is a good book to do just that. Give an introduction to mindfulness in a very simple accessible way, get you started on some form of meditation, and help you understand some of the concepts behind it. This book helped me in all of these things, and for the first time ever I started meditation as well. That alone is worth the time and energy spent in this book.

I feel like this book will be useful for someone who’s curious about mindfulness, and is not looking for something very comprehensive or in a guide like format. This book is about basics, and fundamentals, and if that is what you are looking for then I would recommend it.

Book Review: The Happiest Baby on the Block

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The Happiest Baby on the Block is by far the most important book that I have ever read in my life! I would absolutely recommend this book to anyone who is going to have a baby, or already has a newborn.

Dr. Harvey Karp has come up with the 5 S’s of soothing a newborn baby which are Swaddling, Side, Shushing, Swinging, and Sucking, and this method works like magic. If you are interested in how this works you can see his method in action in this video, and many others like this on Youtube.

I found the book extremely useful because it also explains the science behind this method, and goes into a lot more depth than Youtube videos.

For Zoe, I found that we never needed the Side or the Sucking, and holding her upright with her chin resting on my shoulder worked better than having her on the side. Also, I walk with her in the living room and that is better than swinging for her. So, I am sure you’ll also find that you make some adjustments with your baby.

The methods listed in this book work really really well though, and this is a very important skill to be able to learn as getting a newborn to calm is akin to a superpower for any new parent. So, if you are expecting a baby go buy this book or at the very least – watch as many videos of Dr. Karp as you can!

Book Review: The Expectant Father

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I read The Expectant Father about an year ago when I first learned that I was going to become a father. Knowing nothing about babies, fatherhood or pregnancy I googled the guy’s equivalent of What to Expect when You are Expecting, and landed upon this book.

Expectant Father

I think this is a great book for someone who was in my situation; someone who needs a quick read to get familiarized with what to expect during his wife’s pregnancy as a man. I felt that the book paid for itself when my wife told me she has seen something on one of her reports that says crown to rump height, and I knew what it was whereas she didn’t.

The section on Down’s Syndrome was terrifying to me because we are both relatively older parents, but this is definitely the kind of information you want from such a book.

I skimmed through the sections on college funds, an savings etc. because I felt that I didn’t need as much coaching on the financial aspects of parenthood. Also, I did feel that the book contained a lot of fluff in terms of ideas to make your wife comfortable, doing nice things for her etc. and at some point I realized that the meaty part of the book can probably be distilled in twenty five pages or so.

Regardless, I think this is a worthwhile read for any guy who is going to become a father and has never experienced parenthood before.

Story points should never vary based on the assignee

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One of the most common errors I see in sprint planning is the tendency of people to try and come up with story points based on who is going to work on a story.

If the developer is somewhat inexperienced then the entire team leans towards assigning a higher number than they would have otherwise done.

This is a mistake because if you do this you will never be able to increase that part of your team’s velocity which accrues due to the team becoming better at the task.

If a story is truly worth eight points, and you assign it 13 points based on the fact that the person doing the story will take more time then sure this time it seems like the person contributed 13 points to the team, but in reality they delivered lesser business value. Two or three sprints forth if this person is now more efficient and does 13 points worth of work that will not show up in your team’s velocity because you will assign this story 13 points as well. So, while the person did more work from one sprint to the other – the team’s velocity remained the same.

You see this happen a lot, and I believe a big part of the reason is that people are just used to estimating based on the time it will take them, and not based on relative sizing. This is why it is often helpful to remind everyone what the team’s baseline is and that’s to be kept in mind while doing relative story point estimation.

Book Review: How Google Tests Software

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Personally, one of the most fascinating things that is currently taking place in the software industry is the speed and frequency at which companies like Google, Amazon, Netflix etc. ship their code to production.

These companies are long past the age where a production deployment was a major milestone, and required a whirlwind of activity by many different teams to accomplish.

However, the majority of other companies are still a few years behind these players, and production releases are still a big deal, and are a quarterly event at best.

I have always been curious about how companies such as Google manage testing because in almost every project that I have worked on testing has been this huge monolithic activity that has given everyone headaches. And given how much time testing takes I couldn’t imagine how someone ships their code multiple times a day to production?!

How Google Test Software is a very insightful book into the leading practices and philosophy behind Google’s testing. It is written by people who have been deeply involved in testing for Google, and I’ll paste a little snippet about the authors here to give you a sense of their background and expertise on this subject.

James Whittaker is an engineering director at Google and has been responsible for testing Chrome, maps, and Google web apps. He used to work for Microsoft and was a professor before that. James is one of the best-known names in testing the world over.

Jason Arbon is a test engineer at Google and has been responsible for testing Google Desktop, Chrome, and Chrome OS. He also served as development lead for an array of open-source test tools and personalization experiments. He worked at Microsoft prior to joining Google.

Jeff Carollo is a software engineer in test at Google and has been responsible for testing Google Voice, Toolbar, Chrome, and Chrome OS. He has consulted with dozens of internal Google development teams helping them improve initial code quality. He converted to a software engineer in 2010 and leads development of Google+ APIs. He also worked at Microsoft prior to joining Google.”

The biggest takeaway for me from this book was the focus on automating tests, and on treating testers and developers the same way. The idea that a tester and a developer should have the same skills because the tester will ultimately write code to automate tests was new to me, and one that made a lot of sense if you think about test automation as one of the key things that will enable consistent quality and speed to market for your product.

Another wow moment for me was reading that in Google people raise bugs in the automated tests, and treat automated tests just as they would treat the code itself!

I also really liked the last chapter on the role of test engineers and test managers in the future, and how the authors see this shaping up. It is a little bit of a dire forecast if you are in this role yourself, but I do the see the industry tending in the direction of wanting fewer specialist testers and therefore test managers, and instead the mindset is shifting towards quality being the responsibility of every developer, and quality being baked into the development process itself.

Overall, I quite liked the book; I would however say that there seems to be a lot of repetition in the book, and it could have been a lot shorter without losing any of its key messages.  That being said, there’s a lot to learn from this book, and was a definite worthwhile read for me.