The Battle Hardened Developer is a very useful book - in my opinion - not only for developers. The author, Fiodar Sazanavets, covers topics that are important for everyone who has an office job (even if it’s a remote one). How to restrict social media in our days, and how...

Would I recommend Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman? It’s a very interesting book on how our thinking works and it can open up your mind about your own behaviour. But I mind you, only start reading it if you read a lot and you don’t rush to start...

In Hands-On Design Patterns with C++, the author Fedor Pikus shares the most common design patterns used in modern C++. In fact, not only design patterns but also some best practices and idioms. He doesn’t end the stories simply where the Gang of Four Design Patterns book ends, but he...

How to maximize the benefits of cooperation? Is it better to cooperate with others or to defect? How to decide? How to react when you’re a good person but you’re taken advantage of? Can we avoid escalation till the end? These are questions that Robert Axelrod wanted to answer when...

I’ve been interested in how to write a good resume. Both because I keep one up to date and also because I saw a few ones recently as I helped my managers with technical interviews. I definitely saw bad CVs, and I didn’t feel that I saw any great ones....

When a few months ago I read The Phoenix Project and The Unicorn Project, I learned that they are the modern IT-era reincarnations of The Goal. It was written in a similar style in 1984, but it was targeting the manufacturing businesses with its explanation of the theory of constraints....

If you are familiar with the Pluralsight courses of Kate Gregory, you won’t be surprised by the name of this book. While many consider C++ a complex language that always results in difficult to read and to maintain code, it can be beautiful. It’s probably true that with all the...

In his first book, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, Jordan B Peterson focused on the consequences of too much chaos in our lives and how to make it better, how to bring our lives more into order. But we cannot simply say that order is preferable over...

It’s very hard to start writing this blog post. I’ve been sitting in front of my laptop weeping. Like I did so many times while reading this book. I also had a feeling that “weeping” is one of the most frequent words in Secondhand Time. First of all, the timing...

Being a software engineer is special compared to many other professions in several ways. One aspect of this speciality is that you don’t just go to a job interview after polishing a bit your CV, thinking about your career and maybe reading a few interesting and professionally relevant articles. Getting...