A magazine about programmers, code, and society. Written by and for humans since 2018.
By Adrian Kosmaczewski, September 4th, 2023
None of the previous 48 entries in the Library section of this magazine have dealt with what is commonly referred to as a "coffee table book". Today we rectify such omission by showcasing a massive, recent, and by all standards, very desirable book from Taschen, the legendary German publishing house.
By Adrian Kosmaczewski, August 7th, 2023
The history of the BASIC programming language is, at best, scattered across countless books, a consequence of the disdain and arrogance of generations of programmers who loudly advocated for the dismissal of such a lesser language. Or maybe it is not, and it just so happens that the language was so wildly influential that it is impossible to elaborate on any computer in the past 50 years without coming across the path of a BASIC dialect at some point.
By Adrian Kosmaczewski, July 3rd, 2023
In the twenty-five years since the appearance of the phrase "Open Source", many authors have tried to explain this simple fact: why do software developers willingly and spontaneously collaborate, often on a pro bono basis, to the creation of open-source software? And most importantly, how does this even happen? Many books have been written around this seemingly illogical fact.
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.