Should you use full variable names, or abbreviated? The answer: doesn’t matter.

Who uses UML? The answer may surprise you! Unless you’ve spent any time working as a programmer, then the answer will not surprise you. Not at all.

C.A.R. Hoare thinks program languages should primarily support design and documentation, with programming being a distant third.

Use two choices. It’s easy to get hugely better performance by moving from one choice to two choices. It’s very hard to do better.

Forming. Storming. Norming. Performing. Every writer who writes about teams all reference this one (and only this one) article, and those four stages. It’s foundational, and it rhymes.

The TLDR is simple: if you have a disappearing/reappearing bug, just run it again.

This paper reads like an old man yelling at clouds, but then, half way through, he simply writes a better cloud. (This metaphor is pretty awkward given cloud computing.)

I went to dig into some of the sources cited in Peopleware (see my previous two blog posts), and I fell in love with this 1984 article on Japan’s software industry and Hitachi Software Engineering. It’s a look into a company that feels like peak-era IBM: much bureaucracy and even more success.

I’m not in management, but damned if I don’t love a good management paper. Today it’s Frederick Herzberg’s “One More Time: How Do You Motivate Employees,” where I learn to not kick an employee.

An 1984 paper that models the time it takes to complete a project, and show what happens when you pull are up against bad deadlines. The answer will not surprise you!