A magazine about programmers, code, and society. Written by and for humans since 2018.
by Adrian Kosmaczewski, July 5th, 2021
There was a time when I advertised my services as "Ruby on Rails" programmer. It was by that time that I got to learn the names and work of many people in that field; many of whom had come from the J2EE world, were tired of configuring everything in XML files, and preferred to use… YAML files instead. OK, I am being sarcastic here. Ruby on Rails was truly revolutionary when it appeared.
by Graham Lee, June 7th, 2021
As soon as Adrian and I agreed that Management would be the topic of this issue, I knew that I would share the benefits of Camille Fournier's book, The Manager's Path. It is the most succinct introduction to software engineering management for both managers and the managed out there.
by Adrian Kosmaczewski, May 3rd, 2021
Once upon a time, there was no GitHub, no iPhone, no AWS, no Android, no Google App Engine, no Stack Overflow, no Docker, no Kubernetes, no Rust, no Go, no Swift, no Kotlin, no Git, actually Subversion was barely starting to appear in the radar. Most importantly, there were no App Store yet.
by Graham Lee, April 5th, 2021
It is a fairly well-known, but perhaps not broadly appreciated, fact that Apple's Macintosh could have been a very different computer. Sometimes known as the father of the Mac, sometimes as its eccentric uncle, the project was originally under the direction of computer scientist Jef Raskin. He managed to avoid Steve Jobs's ire for a while by not telling Jobs about the project, but after the Lisa failed and with Woz recovering from a plane crash, Steve needed something to do and checked in on what the former director of the documentation group was up to.
by Adrian Kosmaczewski, March 1st, 2021
Some books are like mirrors. By that I mean that reading them involves a great deal of looking at oneself, both for praise and loathing. Taking a look back in time, reflecting on all those times we thought we were right and we were wrong, bringing back memories of times long gone, some of them painful, most hopefully fun and joyful.
by Graham Lee, February 1st, 2021
You may be worried that I am going to talk about an author of books that are not about programming, and you are correct and incorrect. Correct, in that Hofstadter's books are not about programming (the intellectually hollow like to claim that they are not about anything at all, or that if you think you know what they are about then you did not understand them; this is untrue). Incorrect, in that Hofstadter's books and computer programs themselves are about the same thing.
by Adrian Kosmaczewski, January 4th, 2021
Imagine that you are a fourth grader in California, in 1973. You were 6 or 7 when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon, and there were still astronauts up there just last year. On the radio you can hear Pink Floyd, Elton John or Led Zeppelin. One day your teacher receives an invitation for an experiment involving school kids in a laboratory somewhere in Palo Alto, a location 40 minutes south of San Francisco. Even stranger, the invitation comes from a well-known firm in the photocopier business.
by Graham Lee, December 7th, 2020
I almost wrote this article not about McConnell, but Microsoft Press. Why? Because developers always have something to learn, books have been a great way to share information for centuries, so reading about computing is central to the software engineering experience. If you do not believe me, reflect on the activity you are undertaking right now, reading an online magazine about computing.
by Adrian Kosmaczewski, November 2nd, 2020
Some successful computer books have earned memorable nicknames. There is the "K&R" book, the "Gang of Four" book, and, to please generations of board and role game players, there are also the "Wizard Book", the "Dragon Book", and the "Dinosaur Book". There's the "Camel" book and the "Pickaxe" book. And then, with a decidedly more corporate look and feel, let us talk today about the "Pink Shirt" book, officially titled "The Peter Norton Programmer's Guide to the IBM PC." More corporate, yes, because the PC was after all a business machine coming from a business corporation.
by Graham Lee, October 5th, 2020
Kent Beck might deny that Kent Beck needs an entry in the programmers' library. "All I did was rediscover what other people had done before," he might say, or "all I did was to interpret what Ward Cunningham was doing." But that discovery, that reinterpretation, is the most important part of the process. One person doing things differently is an oddball. Two are the beginning of a revolution.
