Yuriy's blog

The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering  by  Frederick P. Brooks Jr . was the book that opened my eyes on software engineering planning when I was asked to manage the team of developers back in the 2007. It's a really deep dive into imperfectness of the man-month approach of planning in the software development that is actually leads us to the idea of an agile development process.

Interesting small book by 37signals about "The smarter, faster, easier way to build a successful application". I'm a big fan of such agile principles like DSTCPW and YAGNI and this book underlines different practices of how to achieve it in the development of web applications. Few years ago with my colleague we did a presentation on these practices and on how we used them in our project. You can find the free pdf version here .

One more book I read long time ago. Scrum and XP from the Trenches by Henrik Kniberg is a very good book about Scrum. It is based on the real life examples. I glanced on my bookshelf recently and browsed through this book to recall things. It was a good thing to discover that in our company we are using a lot of technics described in it. I think this book is the must read for any agile software development team. For my Russian-speaking friends there is a free pdf version in Russian translated by Ukrainian Agile Community .

Finally, I can write about project I was involved in since 2009. The project name is Owely, and you can visit it at http://www.owely.com . The idea of this nice little thing belongs to the friend of mine Igor Racyborynsky, you can find him using this link , and it is quite simple: create nice, simple, cross-platform screenshot sharing tool. I must admit that we did it, but it was a long way. Started in .NET and now moved to Qt as client app platform and in PHP as web platform Owely became a good unordinary experience for me: team of three, agile, real, self-motivation. Until now we got many positive feedbacks from the users on .NET version of the client app and I'm glad that we did a next great step in the Owely's life. Now it is cross-platform with the same functionality across different OSes. Current version is stable enough, but we already see what should be improved. So, hope you enjoy it, go to http://www.owely.com/download and replace ton of words with 1 screenshot. Plea...

В прошедшую субботу (29.05.2010) участвовал в очередном, а для меня первом :), AgileBaseCamp в Киеве. Конференция проходила в образовательном центре i Klass . Признаюсь, не самое удачное место для проведения подобных мероприятий. Слишком маленькие помещения для open space и кофе брейков, большой, soviet-like style актовый зал, который не очень-то настраивает на hi-tech дискуссии и проблемы с парковкой. Однако, все это невилировалось опытными докладчиками, отличными докладами, а также интересной ИТ тусовкой, пришедшей на camp, среди которых встретились и знакомые лица. Конечно же Киево-Печерская Лавра за окнами, также позитивно влияла на настроение и открытость воспринимать информацию. Я выбрал доклады Николая Алименкова "Путь Agile проекта до первой итерации", Андрея Бабичева " Think Different ", поучавствовал в open space сессии Никиты Филиппова ( @nfilippov ) о том "Как выбрать Product Ownerа", опять послушал Александа Орлова о "Практических ...