The Valuable Dev - Is Inheritance That Evil?
Saturday Greetings, Valuable Developer!
How is it going for you today?
Everything's fine on my side. I was mainly focused this month on writing for The Valuable Dev (around 4 hours per day) and I began some other projects (more on that below).
The article of the month is about inheritance. I know, it's a topic covered already by exactly 1093824 other articles on the Internet, but I'm pretty sure you'll learn at least one thing with this one.
Is Inheritance That Evil?
It's tiring to see dozen of tutorials about inheritance using wrong examples and taking shortcuts to make it as simple as possible. Don't be fooled: inheritance can bring a lot of complexity in a codebase. Yet, it's still considered a pillar of OOP. Why is that?
Updates
The big new: I began to write another book! The subject: soft skills for developers (I'm not sure about the title yet). I know that many readers liked my articles about soft skills so I'm trying my best to do even better.
It's based on 17 studies (and 2 books) for now, but I'll do more research to be as accurate and helpful as possible. It's a project I'm very exited about, soft skills are really important for any software engineer out there.
You'll find more information here.
Other than that:
- I've added a new chapter to the book Building Your Mouseless Development Environment. It's a curated list of great alternative tools you can use instead of the ones I cover in the book.
- I've spend a good chunk of my time to rewrite some of the articles on The Valuable Dev (the ones related to soft skills mostly). I fixed many mistakes and I improved the flow to make them easier to read.
Resources
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I really liked "The Little Printf", an article describing the software industry in a unique way. I don't agree with everything, but it's well written and quite entertaining.
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I find this article by Sam Altman "How to be successful" really good. It's not about software development, but it can still be helpful for everybody.
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Here's a talk about complexity and life. It's more than a talk, it's a live-music-talk-with-cliffhanger. It's wonderfully written, and it blew me away.
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If you're like me and you like to dive into the history of computing, you'll like this talk. It explains four different approaches to programming with legendary programming languages
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Here's another amazing talk about Tolkien, programming, story telling, the need of an audience, and many more ideas. Again, it's entertaining and well written.
Mouseless Tools
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I've launched a new open source project this month: a CLI for Pocket called gocket. If you use Pocket and you like spending your time in the shell, you should definitely check it out.
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The project speedread is quite interesting: it allows you to read faster directly in your terminal.
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If you like to learn new language, the CLI Translate Shell could be really useful for you. You'll have access to a prompt where you can translate everything you want in many languages very easily. I use it every single day.
Let's Connect
If I can help you in any way, you can hit this "reply" button and ask me anything you want. I'm always happy to receive emails.
Similarly, if you think this newsletter is boring, if you didn't like my last article, or if you have any feedback of any sort, don't hesitate to reach out.
Last thing: if you want to help The Valuable Dev thrive, I've made a support page not long ago.
Thanks a lot for your interest in my work and see you in a month!
Matthieu