Joel Spolsky

Best Software Writing I by Joel Spolsky

Posted by Richard on Monday, 9 January 2006

Finished reading Best Software Writing I, selected and introduced by Joel Spolsky.

A good if not great book collecting essays exclusively from the Web about software and its users. The best essays—like "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy" by Clay Shirky; "EA: The Human Story" by ea_spouse; "Autistic Social Software" by danah boyd (already covered in this weblog)—deal with the human element (so much phenomena we think software makes new to us has already been covered by economics, sociology, psychology, etc.) or are useful in a business setting. The latter include but are not limited to "Team Compensation" [PDF] by Mary Poppendieck and "Hazards of Hiring" by Eric Sink, which both deal in the practical aspects of managing the development of software. (In fact, I submit that Eric Sink has more—and more interesting—things to say about the software startups than Paul Graham does.) While interesting for their use of cartooning, essays like "Excel as Database" by Rory Blyth and "A Quick (and Hopefully Painless) Ride Through Ruby (with Cartoon Foxes)" seem overly cute, especially the former, the cartoons not really adding much to the text.

Pointing out the obvious—this is computer software we're talking about—only 3 of the 29 essays were written by women, and all 29 essays were written in the past year or so. To Spolsky's credit, he gave the first book a number and not a year, so there's nothing preventing him or a future editor from including classic essays written about the subject as well as those from the year previous to publication. Also to Spolsky's credit, all essays are selected from texts freely available on the web (a good chunk from weblogs) so that people can forward the writing they've read in dead trees form to their those who might be interested in the articles via IM, email or weblog.

I Went to OSCON and All I Got Were These Lousy Books and T-Shirts

Posted by Richard on Thursday, 4 August 2005

This being my third technology conference, after Gnomedex and Northern Voice, OSCON beat expectations which were higher than my expectations than Gnomedex. On a subject level, it probably didn't beat Northern Voice, but on a fun level, it definitely beat both of the two, Gnomedex being the conference, out of the three, that I enjoyed the least. That was mostly because of a lack of sleep and lack of breakfast, both not a problem at OSCON. This conference was pretty cool too because there were some people I met that I had "known" already, like Eleanor Kruszewski and some "new" people, like Joi Ito very briefly, whom I "know" from the #joiito IRC channel on irc.freenode.net. The convention is over now, and while my Bryght colleagues BoF it up with other Drupalians, I'm cooling off in my hotel room and trying to figure out what, if anything, to do tonight and tomorrow. In the meantime, here's a list of all the books I've either purchased, got free, or somehow managed to acquire without paying for:

  • Dive Into Python by Mark Pilgrim: mostly out of fanboydom for the author, who still writes semi-publicly on comments and email lists, but who wrote unbelievably great articles for his now-defunct weblog and currently-home page dive into mark. I had initially wanted to buy the book through Amazon.com through his associates ID so that as much benefit as possible would go to him, but 20% off at a conference I was attending for work was a sweeter deal. (I've linked the title above to his associates ID.)
  • Linux in a Nutshell, 5th Edition by Ellen Siever, Aaron Weber, Stephen Figgins, Robert Love and Arnold Robbins: I think I already have a copy of this, and have exactly zero personal computers at my disposal that run it. I don't use my PC much for Windows stuff anymore, so this book will come in handy eventually.
  • The Best Software Writing I by Joel Spolsky: deceptively, this is a book by Apress, who had a booth at OSCON, and they gave me a t-shirt because, along with Dive Into Python, that constituted a two-Apress-book-at-one-time purchase. This looks really good, as a quick flip-through makes it seem as if it focusses on the human element of software development, rather than the technology or the code itself.
  • Advanced PHP Programming by George Schlossnagle: it was sitting on a table with a small booklet that I must have dropped along the way. It covers PHP 5 and doesn't really seem to cover XML at all except indirectly through sections on XML-RPC and the MetaWeblogAPI.

Though not by any means a comprehensive haul, I got some t-shirts too:

  • two for my friend on the East Coast. One that says "I'm a Bryght girl" (I just created a PubSub feed—RSS and Atom for those at home—to watch for people who specifically mention they are either wearing theirs or see a woman wearing one on the street) and another for "My CMS kicks your CMS's ass".
  • I got one of the latter for myself, in a guy's size and colour.
  • an ActiveState t-shirt for filling out a survey, telling them thanks for hosting PHP meetups at their Vancouver office every month or so
  • a shirt that doubles as an invitation to a party I will probably not attend

That's it. I was complimented at least three times today on my Creative Commies t-shirt, which I bought months ago.The only sessions I attended during the week were the CalDAV session, Sam Ruby's Python session briefly (as already mentioned), and Zak Greant's session on ext/mysqli for PHP 5. No non-technical books purchased, at least not yet. Powell's is 3 blocks away, so that shouldn't be a problem. When packing for the trip, I did keep room in my backpack for a few things to take back to Vancouver with me, including a laptop cooling stand that I so desperately need.