Who you should read part (part 1)
I took the red-eye to Minneapolis last Sunday night. To help me get to sleep, I turned on a really mellow album that I own. I then started to ponder a perl implementation of the Y combinator (whether intentional or on purpose no one can say). As I began to fall asleep the music and the perl code begin to merge into one harmonious musical expression of anonymous recursive functions. For a moment the code and the music became one. I can only describe the experience as unexpected.
So yeah, I think about software. And thus I have taken that experience as my cue to begin doing what I had originally planned for this blog: making stuff up about software.
At first I thought it would be really easy. Write a few witty things and bam, all my readers would soon be out trying to by an APL keyboard, or when that failed, making their own APL keyboards. Sadly it appears my readers are too smart to be bamboozled by my tomfoolery. Alas.
So Instead let me point you to a few people who I enjoy reading (because they are (a)smart, (b)funny, (c)interesting, or (d)great bamboozlers (I hope you realize the only reason I am writing this at all is to use the word 'bamboozle')). I figure this will be an on going series here at my dance party.
Alright, let us start with a software all-star of sorts (at least in terms of software blogs). About a year ago Joel Spolsky indirectly said that 50% of the good writing about software right now is by Steve Yegge. Dare Obasanjo said of Stevey, "You can consider him to be the new school version of Joel Spolsky".
Right now Stevey is at google. You might have heard of a project he's working on to port Rails to javascript (javascript being one of the google approved languages while ruby is not). He likes to talk about languages and editors (really only the best editor) and software development in general.
I would suggest reading both his new stuff and his his older posts. Here are a few that you might want to start with:
- Good Agile, Bad Agile, this one made a bit of a splash when he posted it
- Practicing Programming
- Ancient Languages: Perl (and for a funny follow up go read How to Make a Funny Talk Title Without Using The Word "Weasel" and find the part about Larry Wall)
- Five Essential Phone Screen Questions
- And a few emacs posts: Effective Emacs, The Emacs Problem, My .emacs File, Shiny and New: Emacs 22 (Update: oh, and I forgot My save excursion)
- I also suggest you watch the keynote he gave at this years OSCON
Well, you'd better get started. Stevey's posts are long and deep so really there's no more time to waste.
