The winter holiday season is slowly turning to its end, and perhaps not a moment too soon. Not that I didn't enjoy all the traveling and stuff - I certainly did and the time off was great - but the backlog is getting ridiculous. My Bugzilla review queue is at its all time high, there are about 150 reasonably important emails to be handled and quite a few other things to do before I'm back in normal operation.
A few quick notes from my holidays (and the books I read):
Pelican Brief was decent. I still need to read a few more books from the Clancy/Grisham/etc. clan to be actually able rank them, but I look forward to it. Some light literature was a nice break from the routine. Well, how about the more routine IT stuff then?
Writing Secure Code is a must read for everybody in software development. Despite being Windows-oriented, many of the concepts described in the book contribute to a healthy generic understanding of many security issues. Fully reading and understanding the book would take weeks, but even a few hours of browsing it will give you many good ideas on improving the security and privacy aspects of your application. Definitely recommended.
UML Distilled, 3rd Ed. was another interesting read. I wouldn't embrace it as warmly as I did for the security book, but a good read nonetheless. The innate heaviness of UML gets thrown away on the introductory pages, and the book itself is a critical overview of the most useful elements of UML. Well, that's certainly something different from the usual reference-tomes. If you already know how to model things and want to do it in UML, read this. If you don't, you'll need additional guidance - this is not a "learn how to model using UML in 21 days" book.
And finally, a realization dawned during one particularly nice and sunny winter day: I really should blog more. It's not about being able to write more things for you to read, but rather about having the reason and the context to think and re-think the daily dilemmas in life. I spent years convincing myself that thinking is actually work at its best, and it's perfectly fine to spend time just milling things over (instead of producing an instant concrete result). Next I need to convince myself that thinking tools - such as this blog - are an equally acceptable way of promoting happiness and efficiency.