October PragPub »

• Uncle Bob, You’re Wrong
• Improvement Boards for the Win
• A Boy in Silicon Valley

Plus Swaine’s World, Technically Awake, New Manager’s Playbook, Shady Illuminations, On Tap, the PragPub Puzzle, Antonio on Books, From the Pragmatic Bookshelf, and the BoB Page.

Recently Released:

• Programming Crystal 
• The Ray Tracer Challenge 
• Swift Style, Second Edition 
• Property-Based Testing with PropEr, Erlang, and Elixir 

It's October already, and we've got you covered with this month's pumpkin spice latte version of PragPub magazine.

Just kidding, there's no pumpkin spice in it. But there is a bunch of other cool stuff. Come check it out.

October PragPub Magazine

The October PragPub is now available.

What killed Agile? Was it managers? Elite architects, designers, and analysts? Consultants and conferences and certification programs? Project management, meetings, roles, slogans, and buzzwords? Or was it fear, uncertainty, and doubt? Maybe it was an inside job. Some of its parents seem most ready to close the coffin lid. Or was Agile a victim of its own success? Who or what can we blame for its demise?

Trick question! Agile isn’t dead, because Agile isn’t a thing, because “agile” isn’t a noun. You can be agile. You can’t do Agile. Right?

No, that’s just an editor talking. It’s more complicated than that. But whether Agile is dead or not, it shows no sign of going away, so we continue to think and talk about it. The Agile Manifesto spawned a lot of thinking over the years about how to make software and what it meant to be agile. This month two agile makers of software take a fresh look at agile software development by looking with fresh eyes at that founding document.

Daniel Markham takes on both “Uncle Bob” Martin and Martin Fowler, two of the authors of the Agile Manifesto, to argue that being agile is all about managing. That the Agile Manifesto itself is a management how-to document, not a technical one. Not a universally accepted position.

Allen Holub also has some advice on how to be agile today, and he also has something to say about the Agile Manifesto that may startle some folks who think it laid down a set of practices. In fact, Allen says, there is only one practice even mentioned in the Manifesto’s principles. And Allen thinks we can become more agile by improving how we follow that one agile practice.

Also in this issue, PragPub’s editor continues his ongoing series on computer history with a discussion of how Silicon Valley came to be. Along the way he paints a picture of a boy growing up in the valley while that was going on.

All our columnists are on board. Marcus Blankenship warns about statically typed programmers. Russ Olsen realizes that everything he knows about debugging software he learned from watching his dad tinker with clock radios and coffee makers. John Shade is again troubled by intelligence, human or artificial, and what he sees as the general lack of any. And we have the usual reports on tech news and new tech books, and a puzzle to test your wits.

We hope you enjoy this October issue of PragPub!

Now available from theprosegarden.com.

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