Blog post on recent talk

20 Mar 2015

So I recently did a talk on Joy of Software Development. You can read more about the talk here (link includes slides and list of topics covered). This post is devoted to the references I’d promised to link to in the talk. Since it was an introductory talk, and I didn’t want to bore people to death, I decided to cover lots of topics at a shallow depth, instead of covering a few topics deeply.

This means that I need to post more material for people to follow up on. So, this is that reference blog post. Make sure you have a copy of the slides open as you go through these links.

Update: I also gave this talk (with a few updates) at GeekSkool in October 2015.

Software Development in general

• Hiring in software industry is broken
• Breadth First Learning
• Recommended readings for developers by Jeff Atwood (codinghorror)
• Ship v1, even if it sucks
• Ship early, ship often
• Never rewrite, always refactor by Joel Spolsky
• The Joel Test to score a software company.

Software Security

• Security is the opposite of obscurity
• OWASP Top 10
• Software Security course on coursera
• CTFTime - See upcoming CTF contests
• SmashTheStack - Learn buffer overflow attacks
• Nebula Exploit Excercises
• Backdoor - Security CTF platform for beginners by SDSLabs

Starting Advice

• Use bcrypt
• Ask questions on Security.SE
• Principle Of Least Privilege
• Never trust user input

Agnostic Software Development

• What should I do to be language-agnostic?
• Seven languages in seven weeks (Book)
• Right tool for the job
• Language Agnostic
• Balance between “right tool for the job” and familiarity

Free and open source development

• Why Open Source misses the point of Free Software - by Richard Stallman
• Open source definition
• Choose a license
• What is free software?
• Why Free Software Movement is important
• Mozilla mission statement

Version Control

• Pro Git (Book)
• Learn Git in your browser
• Hg Init Mercurial tutorial
• Difference betweeng Hg and Git
• Benefits of git
• Must read post on git branching model
• Git in 20 commands

Tests

During the talk, I decidedly used the term TDD incorrectly. TDD technically means going test first, but I used it as an introduction to testing in general. This was intentional. The links here will use TDD in the correct sense.

• Test Driven Development Tutorial
• Why TDD works
• How much to cover in tests
• Importance of testing - Jeff Atwood
• Benefits of going test first
• Testing culture at github
• Source code I used in talk

REST and APIs

• Why was REST a breakthrough
• A simple lucid explanation of REST
• What API to use
• NIH Syndrome

Unix Philosophy

• The epic Knuth vs McIlroy story
• Zawinski’s Law
• http://onethingwell.org/
• Wikipedia article on the topic is surprisingly good
• Good examples of pipes

Books

These are books i absolutely recommend every software developer to read, in order.

1. Don’t Make Me Think
2. The Pragmatic Programmer

Other than these, I recommend reading Code Complete, Mythical Man Month, and everything by Jeff Atwood and Zach Homan, but only after you have read the above 2 books.

How to get better at Software Development?

This is just a small list of topics I cover in a recent blog post. This is only present in the updated version of the talk which I gave at GeekSkool. You can read the blog post here to look at the points I make.

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Phew. That was a lot of links. If you are ever interested in learning more about software development, feel free to contact me. If you ever feel like chatting with me, I’m usually online at chat.sdslabs.co.

Buxton's Rule

08 Mar 2015

I consider myself a UX enthusiast. I consider that term to aptly describe my interest in UX. As I’m deeply involved in many UX and design decisions, I try to be well read on design and UX principles. While reading a discussion about iPhone prototypes on HN in June ‘12, I came across this comment:

Goes to show what it takes to achieve excellence: lots of trial and error. Produce at least 3 alternatives for every design decision (Bill Buxton agrees).

— mstuherl

It sounded so basic, yet often I see designers trying to defend their first design, because it seems good enough to them. No good design is ever born at the first step. Just like any other process, it takes multiple iterations to perfect it.

I recently got in touch with Morgan (mstuherl on HN), and thanked him for his comment. Here’s what he said when I told him I wanted to dub it mstuherl’s rule:

Hah! My name’s Morgan, so you can call it Morgan’s Rule if you like, but it comes from Bill, so Buxton’s rule would be more appropriate. His book Sketching User Experience contains yet more wisdom!

So thats what I’m calling it:

Further Reading

• Iteration in the Design of the Human-Computer Interface - Bill Buxton
• Sketching User Experiences by Bill Buxton
• Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug (My first recommendation to every software dev/designer)

scytheCTF and Updates

27 Feb 2015

February has been an interesting month for me. I haven’t been programming a lot, but have definitely been writing a lot. I have got a few more upcoming projects as well, which I’d love to announce soon.

We recently held a short 8-hour CTF (scytheCTF) on Backdoor. I made two challenges for the CTF:

• SHITTY-OTP
• LOST-FOUND

Both of these problems were rush jobs because of several reasons:

1. We didn’t have much time to set the problems.
2. We didn’t expect much participation in scytheCTF.
3. scytheCTF was a test CTF, just to figure out any issues with the internet launch of Backdoor.
4. scythe is also supposed to be beginner friendly, unlike our annual BackdoorCTF, which will include much harder problems.

I had a lot of fun with @kandoiabhi in setting the problems. It was also great seeing @DefConUA participate in such a small-scale contest.

Other than scythe, we recently had our annual SDSLabs trip to Rishikesh, which I enjoyed a lot. I also wrote a small post on my work setup.