• Issue #59: BASIC,  Library

    Mark Jones Lorenzo

    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.

  • Issue #58: Community,  Library,  Women

    Nadia Asparouhova

    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.

  • Issue #57: Dress Code,  Library

    Tom DeMarco & Timothy Lister

    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.

  • Issue #56: Operating Systems,  Library

    Abraham Silberschatz, Peter Baer Galvin, & Greg Gagne

    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.