Essays

No Silver Bullet

"Of all the monsters that fill the nightmares of our folklore, none terrify more than werewolves, because they transform unexpectedly from the familiar into horrors. For these, one seeks bullets of silver that can magically lay them to rest.

Mind the Gap

Like chess or painting or writing novels, making money is a very specialized skill. But for some reason we treat this skill differently. No one complains when a few people surpass all the rest at playing chess or writing novels, but when a few people make more money than the rest, we get editorials saying this is wrong.

Dr. Dobb's History of Computers

From Web Years to Mythical Man Months, the world of computing has had decades of revolutionary innovation. Dag Spicer will take a look back at the famous and the sometimes not-so-famous pioneers who took part in the revolution.

Surprised by Wealth

Eric Raymond learns that a company for which he's on the board of directors and has quite a few shares of stock, just had an outrageous IPO. Will it change his life?

The Cash and the Calling

This paper analyzes a model of software development in which closed-source applications make use of open-source artificial intelligence parts. We begin by observing that AI has a huge potential but that problems limit the development of applications.

The Cathedral and the Bazzar

This is an essay by Eric S. Raymond on software engineering methods, based on his observations of the Linux kernel development process and his experiences managing an open source project, fetchmail. It was first presented by the author at the Linux Kongress on May 27, 1997 and was published as part of a book of the same name in 1999.

The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code

From the introduction: "Have you ever heard of SEMA? It's a fairly esoteric system for measuring how good a software team is. No, wait! Don't follow that link! It will take you about six years just to understand that stuff.

Software Engineering Stories

Here is a collection of stories about software engineering. You don't have to be an engineer to enjoy these stories, but it might help to at least know one.

Code as Design: Three Essays by Jack W. Reeves

These essays by Jack W. Reeves offer three perspectives on a single theme, namely that programming is fundamentally a design activity and that the only final and true representation of "the design" is the source code itself.

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