Weekly review: Week ending October 12, 2014

I’m trying to do my best in organizing myself, hence these weekly reviews I’m planning to do more often, hopefully on a weekly basis. The posts probably won’t be interesting to regular readers, but if you are a stalker, here is some candy I’m throwing at ya :)

So without further ado, I can start with the brief overview of how my week went.

I have read two books in the last week, both are really good and would recommend them. The first one: Designing Web Applications by Nathan Barry will teach you the fundamentals of web design, how you should think about your web application (not web site), and how you should structure the user flow. Barry goes through great examples and gives you a very good base to start learning about web application design, and UX design.

The other book I would recommend to everyone, and if you have read it, I think you should re-read it on a regular basis. The book is called Thank You For Arguing and it is by Jay Heinrichs. Heinrichs teaches us the great art of Rhetoric, an art that was forgotten, and is getting a small revival now. If you want to learn how to argue better (I didn’t say fight), get what you want, while leaving the other side also satisfied, and get vaccinated from false dogmas, whether in advertising, politics or wherever you encounter them, go and read the book right now. But be warned, although this skill may look like magic to some people, it really isn’t, it’s just a better way to articulate yourself, not get played by people trying to play you, and have a better life in the end.

As I was a bit stressed up from private issues over the last couple of weeks, I had to ramp up work, and didn’t have much time for anything outside of the usual “work stuff”.

Plans for next week

I have more reading planned for the next couple of weeks, my Kindle Paperwhite is loaded with a couple new books to read:

• Benjamin Franklin: An American Life by Walter Isaacson
• Book Yourself Solid by Michael Port
• Understanding Computation: From Simple Machines to Impossible Programs by Tom Stuart

I’ll probably be reading more about UX and design also, so if you have good books or resources for someone starting out in that field, feel free to leave them in the comments.

We also have a plan to migrate a part of the system to Ember.js, from the monorail application we are using now. So that will be something thrilling to do, as I have to figure out how to incorporate ember-cli with a our production application.