Ian compares Pylons and TurboGears and makes a few interesting general observations along the way.
The axioms of web architecture and an invitation for big vendors to understand them.
Sam Ruby on how DVCS + mailing list has removed the need for bug tracking systems on some projects. I'm feeling a similar pull in my own work.
The greatest thing I've ever seen on the internet.
"We’re born as unreal people but somehow get turned into respectable members of society with good cover stories."
"You (and I) suck. Plan for it. Expect it. Get over it."
Erik Engbrecht: "Java took cheap Unix processes and made them expensive. To compensate, it provided primitives for multithreading."
Rafe kicks off a series detailing various aspects of his coding philosophy. The first is near and dear to my heart: less code
Not sure how I missed linking to this. Pretty much mirrors my feelings on PHP to a T, except more thought out.
Brad Neuberg (Google Gears): "Our historical closeness to the web creates a kind of myopia, where we can't see how amazing it is. It's a billion Library of Alexandria's dropped into our laps."
Ahh, those were the days... What's left to fight for?
Atwood's had a great year.
"Most of the time you should be working on The Next Most Important Thing. But there are times when it’s okay to depart. Times when you need to depressurize after completing a dive in the stressful, complex pool of Big Problems."
From IMil in comments: "Shocking statement #(n+1): 80% of the 80% believe that they belong to [the] 20%." A recursively shocking statement! i.e., (0..Infinity).inject (0.8) { |x,n| x * 0.8 }
"What if closures and meta-programming and expressive type systems and annotations and all of the other tools that give us the power to build powerful abstractions actually don’t scale to larger teams?"
"... coined by Ward Cunningham to describe the obligation that a software organization incurs when it chooses a design or construction approach that's expedient in the short term but that increases complexity and is more costly in the long term."
"The easy and fun way to test whether a mission statement/purpose/motto is garbage is to negate it and see whether it still holds up."
"Talking about a software development schedule more than a year out is like talking about where we go after we die. Everyone has some idea where we'll end up, but those ideas differ wildly, and there's a lack of solid evidence to support any of them."
"There is an important tradeoff between the computational power of a language and the ability to determine what a program in that language is doing."
"It was as if its architects were given a perfectly good hammer and gleefully replied, 'neat! With this hammer, we can build a tool that can pound in nails.'" -- that is THE SINGLE FUNNIEST SENTENCE ever assembled in the history of english language!
"You will avoid taking care of simple things because the solution is inelegant or simply feels wrong. Time to think will no doubt yield a better result, you’ll say." Aye!
"... it cannot be denied that logic and philosophy stand to lose an important conceptual label should the meaning of BTQ become diluted to the point that we must distinguish between the traditional and erroneous modern usage. This is why we fight."
"... on Java, too many web frameworks - think JSF, or Struts 1.x - consider the Web something you work around using software patterns. The goal is get off the web, and back into middleware..."
Q: Are you working for Reddit as full-time programmer? A: No, I left reddit several months ago. Q: Why did you leave? A: My boss asked me to.
"... let me try one last time to say why I wrote this book, what it is about, and what its principal thesis is."
Tim reviews the new Hofstadter book.
Being neither unhappy or intelligent, I wouldn't know :)
John Panzer: "Software development is a knowledge acquisition activity, not a manufacturing activity."
Nugget of wisdom: "... developing for the web is frequently about accepting small compromises to big philosophical ideals."
"the version control system is a first order effect on software, along with two others - the build system and the bugtracker. Those choices impact absolutely everything else. Things like IDEs, by comparison, don't matter at all."
"The thing that unites the free software developers, and the only thing that unites us, is that we make free software."
Somebody should create a feed that posts a single random entry per day from the Atom Wiki.
More good stuff from Chalain. This time the topic is classes that end in "er".
A nice go at classifying different types of code transition.
Dijkstra's writing style is so perfect.
I missed the precursor to the last link. This one might even be better..
I would love to read this but I'm too busy doing work. Let me know if it's interesting. Work, work, work! ;)