A magazine about programmers, code, and society. Written by and for humans since 2018.
By Adrian Kosmaczewski, June 5th, 2023
One of the saddest realizations of my career in the software industry has been discovering that no "Human Resources" manager I have worked with had heard about "Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams" by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister. Not a single one. I'm not even talking about having read it, but at least knowing of its existence. None. Nothing. Nada.
By Adrian Kosmaczewski, May 1st, 2023
Most of you are reading this article on a computer running some flavor of Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, or Linux, on your browser of choice–with a large majority using Google Chrome at the time of this writing. If you are serious about software development, it makes sense to understand how those operating systems work, even if your day-to-day bread-winning activity involves only "higher-level" concepts such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. The preeminence of web browsers as the de facto operating system for "front end" web developers, means that a lot of knowledge of the actual underlying operating system is lost, and this is a tragedy in itself.
By Adrian Kosmaczewski, April 3rd, 2023
So far, in this Library section, we have only covered books in English. We have already discussed the hegemony of this language, and we think it is important to challenge it; so today we break the mould and introduce a book originally published in Spanish in 2009, "Gödel ∀ (para todos)" by Argentine mathematicians Guillermo Martínez and Gustavo Piñeiro, the former also a renowned fiction author.
By Adrian Kosmaczewski, March 6th, 2023
As a member of Generation X, this author has had the distinctive privilege of trying to explain computer topics to family members born in the early 1900s. In particular, my grandmother would, around 1999, ask what I did for a living. As a Polish immigrant who arrived in Argentina months before World War II, she could not have been further away from the likes of the World Wide Web, the Netscape browser, or the VBScript programming language. I tried as hard as I could, but of course, I failed miserably. For most of her life, she must have thought, just like my mother, that I was into some dodgy business.
By Adrian Kosmaczewski, February 6th, 2023
Arguably, one of the most common questions all gamers ask themselves at some point (usually in the middle of a space battle or while solving the most intricate of mysteries) is, how do people make games? Fortunately, several of the most fabulous game designers of the past 50 years have written books to enlighten us not only about the algorithms but also the storytelling, the team dynamics, and the economics required to build a ground-breaking game.
By Adrian Kosmaczewski, January 2nd, 2023
We have often said in the pages of this magazine that some books carry with them the Zeitgeist of their era. Examples are Bruce Tate's "Beyond Java," Joe Armstrong's "Programming Erlang," and Toby Segaran's "Programming Collective Intelligence." Such books have a tremendous impact upon publication, freezing in words not only a valuable body of knowledge, but also the spirit and promise of a new direction for the industry. Even if the APIs they describe become obsolete over time (which is mainly unavoidable), they remain as hallmarks of an era, valuable witnesses of the preoccupations and needs of practitioners at the time of their publication.
By Adrian Kosmaczewski, December 5th, 2022
We have often talked about software economics in this magazine. For example, when we enumerated Eric Sink's perspectives on the software business, discussed platforms as a paradigm for economic analysis, or talked about how Brad Cox advocated for an object-oriented economy. But there is a more extraordinary author about the subject, one we mentioned a few times in this magazine and who sadly passed away last August: Barry Boehm.
By Adrian Kosmaczewski, November 7th, 2022
Western culture has long been fascinated with what the French call "Extrême-Orient"; since the times of Marco Polo, most probably since biblical times. We (the editors of a magazine that is, after all, a pure product of Western civilization) assign certain qualities to the thinking patterns of those regions: wisdom, calmness, thoughtfulness, and reflection. Eastern philosophy is often analyzed in counterpoint, in a tangential or even orthogonal fashion from its western counterpart: Confucius versus Aristotle; reason versus faith; extrovert versus introvert; yin versus yang; pandas versus grizzlies; Bruce Lee versus Chuck Norris.
By Adrian Kosmaczewski, October 3rd, 2022
Many different things bear the name "Gang of Four"; however, in this case, we are going to talk about a major bestseller in the history of computer books: "Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software" by Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and John Vlissides. There is a high probability that every reader of this article owns, has read, or has at least skimmed through the pages of a GoF book once or twice. The book has been reprinted dozens of times (40 times at least until 2012.) It has been the subject of uncountable articles, videos, panel discussions, and, yes, also attacks.
By Adrian Kosmaczewski, September 5th, 2022
Let us talk about a book that would be usually featured in the "Business" section of your nearest bookstore. As such, it might have been overlooked by those inspecting the shelves of the "Computer" section. This book delves deeply into the economic fabric of the software industry and, for that reason, becomes a much-needed read by all software workers.