I’m declaring my storage problems to be resolved. Though I’m sure this will come up again. I have to believe at this point I will not encounter the issue for several more years. I now have about 5 TB of free storage across several systems, with another 1.5 TB drive ready to act as either a backup or additional space. About three years ago I had about 1 TB of free space and no idea how I’d ever fill it. Now I know.
The introduction of catalogs of patterns has been a great advancement to software engineering. These collections of common solutions to common design problems are an excellent way to pass knowledge of the software engineering craft from one practitioner to another. I am happy to have several great texts from this category taking up valuable shelf space. Design Patterns, Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture, the Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture series, Release It!, and Enterprise Integration Patterns are some of my favorite references that continue to be a source of inspiration whenever I encounter difficult design decisions. However, they are not the last word in software engineering that some engineers present them as. Acting as though pointing out that a pattern exists is a valid appeal to authority for using that pattern is like saying that serving seafood to those that are allergic is acceptable because the seafood was prepared using the recipe of a master chef.
Here are a few of my favorite software engineering related books I’ve read in the last year. To make this list the book had to be something I read in 2009, and it had to be interesting, useful, or just plain insanely great at totally changing my perspective on something.