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Keza MacDonald

by Adrian Kosmaczewski, 

Precisely as this issue lands on your browser or e-book reader, "The Super Mario Galaxy Movie" is hitting theaters and receiving (at the time of this article) a rather tepid reception from audiences and critics. A feature film inspired by one of the most popular game franchises of all time, itself the brainchild of a company that loves secrecy, rarely revealing anything about itself, with a zeal that would make Apple jealous. The second of this month's Library entries hits with particularly good timing.

Jessica Livingston

by Adrian Kosmaczewski, 

In many ways, the year 2007 was a crossroad in tech, and this has much more to do than just the introduction of the iPhone (although, by all means, that was quite a watershed moment). 2007 was the last moment in time our software workmanship operated without Git or GitHub. Without the Go programming language. Without Y Combinator. Without Stack Overflow. Without Android. Without new JavaScript frameworks every weekend. Without Twitter. Without DevOps. Without Palantir. Without Instagrams influencers. Without Docker containers or Kubernetes. Without Claude Code. Such was l'air du temps captured in the pages of one of our Library choices for this month: "Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days" by Jessica Livingston.

Eileen Uchitelle

by Adrian Kosmaczewski, 

It is seemingly impossible to talk about Ruby without talking about Rails, and this article will not be the exception. This web framework has had a both terrific and terrible (some would say oversized) influence in the past 20 years, and has, against all odds, regained interest in a world of microservices, DevOps engineers, containers, and Kubernetes clusters. Rails has been able to adapt to the unknown, from the burgeoning cloud services of 2005 to the latest fads, but always gathering a chorus of frowning eyes around the "magic" it uses and enables.

Joanna Rutkowska

by Adrian Kosmaczewski, 

In a key scene of the 2012 blockbuster James Bond film "Skyfall", MI6 quartermaster Q, played by Ben Whishaw, realizes too late that plugging a cable into the laptop of a notoriously skilled terrorist like Raoul Silva (one of Javier Bardem's most remarkable roles) was a terrible idea. After a few seconds of connection, the laptop infects the systems of MI6, releasing all physical doors and disabling all security guards, prompting Silva to escape and wreak havoc through the London Underground. A message appears on the laptop screen, taunting Q, reading "Not such a clever boy".

Felienne Hermans

by Adrian Kosmaczewski, 

Today we are going to talk about a person in a quest to let everyone know that the most popular functional programming language in the world is none other than Microsoft Excel. Yes, the claim sounds outlandish, debatable, laughable, even ridiculous, but she has both data and anecdotal experience backing her point, and this month's Vidéothèque movie is a brilliant presentation of it. Also, let us be honest; as software developers it is our duty to use our beloved brains, and go past the mocking stages in order to learn and embrace the unknown; in this case, the language used by most of the modern business world to communicate: spreadsheets.

Grace Hopper & David Letterman

by Adrian Kosmaczewski, 

Among the many documents available at the Computer History Museum website there is an interesting artifact: a commercial brochure published in 1957 by the Remington Rand UNIVAC, "a division of Sperry Rand Corporation", titled "introducing a new language for automatic programming". In it, we learn about the advantages of the new (at the time) FLOW-MATIC programming language, the brainchild of United States Navy Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper.

A Review Of Research Around Programming Education From The 1960s To Today

by Adrian Kosmaczewski, 

The problem of teaching programming skills to new generations of software engineers is as old as the computers themselves. Each generation has tried to do it in a slightly different way, with various degrees of success. There is a lot of literature available online about the subject, and in this article we will point out papers and books that we found to be the most noteworthy. By no means this is an exhaustive list, but it features some interesting entries that might serve as a starting point for your own research.

Freada Kapor Klein

by Adrian Kosmaczewski, 

Let us agree on one basic principle, one that most regular readers of this magazine already know is a core tenet at its heart: the phrase "Human Resources" is atrocious. There is no other way to describe the appalling sentiment and the contempt brought into our minds as we read such a contraption. Even worse, the fact that some people voluntarily choose to wear it as part of their professional title is beyond our comprehension. If you do not agree with this idea, you might want to stop reading altogether.

Amy Brown & Greg Wilson

by Adrian Kosmaczewski, 

Most software developers are ejected from academia into the jaws of the business of software with little preparation. Of course, they are equipped with good enough knowledge about some more or less relevant programming language, and maybe some algorithm, hopefully including the venerable linked list reversion, indispensable to pass the dreaded coding interview. But not much more.

Margaret Hamilton

by Adrian Kosmaczewski, 

On Sunday, July 20th, 1969, at precisely 20:14:19 UTC, just a mere three minutes before touchdown, the voice of Edwin Eugene Aldrin Jr. confirmed the "Go for landing" order received from Mission Control together with a phrase nobody wanted to hear at that moment: "Program alarm - 1201."

Nadia Asparouhova

by Adrian Kosmaczewski, 

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.

Mayuko Inoue

by Adrian Kosmaczewski, 

The archetype of software engineering dress code is quite parochial: a t-shirt (usually featuring a conference or programming language logo, or a geek joke), a pair of jeans, snickers, and a sweatshirt, in case the weather gets more San Francisco-like than you might expect. And that is it. Let us admit it: the "about us" page of software companies often looks like advertising for The Gap, American Apparel, or sometimes even, sadly, Abercrombie & Fitch, minus the abs, of course.

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