September PragPub »

• Teaching Beginners
• What Is Teachable Code?
• On Diversity
• Boiled Carrots
• Swift: What are Protocols with Associated Types?

Plus: On Tap, Swaine’s World, New Manager’s Playbook, Don’t Add Your Two Cents, Johanna on Managing Product Development, Antonio on Books, The BoB Pages

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Happy Birthday to Star Trek! The franchise turns 50 years old this week. We've already got communicators, and tricorders are on the way. Now if someone could get to work on a functional warp drive and transporters, we'd be all set on the tech front. In the meantime...

Martin Fowler. Derek Sivers. Swift programming. Boiled Carrots. Several cautionary lessons on the perils of sharing your knowledge. In the September PragPub, now available from theprosegarden.com.

September PragPub Magazine

Part of every professional’s work is teaching. It could be in a formal classroom setting or a talk at a conference or user group, it could be the guidance you give a new team member or the feedback you give in pair programming, it could be suggestions or praise you offer as a manager or team lead, it could be in your documentation or in a blog post or an article in a programming magazine. One way or another, you spend a significant part of your time sharing the knowledge and expertise you’ve acquired. And it’s not trivial to do it well.

The problem, as Swizec Teller explains in our lead feature, is that you know more than you think you do. And that makes it hard to recognize what others don’t know. Peter Jang points out how your clean, well-crafted code is not necessarily the best code for teaching purposes. The good news is that he shows you how to turn good code into teachable code.

When you’re in a management or tech lead role, everything you do is teaching. Your biggest challenge may be not teaching the wrong things. Marcus Blankenship writes about the promises you make without realizing you’re making them. He shows how to recognize these situations so you can avoid breaking a promise you never knew you made. Another thing you may be doing without realizing it is stealing credit when all you think you’re doing is putting in your two cents. Derek Sivers explains how to avoid that mentoring mistake.

Cultural and gender differences shouldn’t get in the way of sharing your knowledge, but we know that they often do. Natasha Murashev shares her own experience with the diversity challenge in software development, and talks about ways to address it.

Natasha actually has two articles in this issue. She’s one of our go-to experts on the Swift language, and she shares her expertise with us this month in an article on Protocols with Associated Types. In keeping with Swizac’s insight, she discovered that her audience at a recent talk didn’t know as much as she expected, and the result was this article.

And there’s more. Regular columnist Johanna Rothman returns with advice on how to say no in a way that management can understand — and accept. And programming legend Martin Fowler shows that sometimes the problem isn’t where you think it is. And as usual, Antonio Cangiano has all the new tech books and your editor offers his review of recent developments in tech and serves up a puzzle. We hope you enjoy the issue.

Now available from theprosegarden.com.

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