Reading Notes

When Fernando Corbató accepted the Turing Award for, among other things, inventing the computer password, he described my new favorite bug. From On building systems that will fail (1991), by Fernando J. Corbató Imagine a UNIX system with one admin user. The system grows, and the single admin user becomes a bottleneck. So it’s decided that multiple people can log into the admin user at the same time. A certain (unnamed) text editor is used to edit files. This text editor assumes that only one instance of it will be open at a time. One person is logged in as admin, and starts editing the system password file. Another person is logged in as admin, and starts editing the message of the day file. One ill-timed save file later, and the system password file is saved as the message of the day.

Algol 68 is the Cronus of programming languages. Cronus is the titan who fathered Zeus, an important character in the myth, but vastly overshadowed by his own progeny. Algol 68 was an important language, and had a fascinating history. This post is a combination history, lesson, and filled with quotes from people who were there. There is an unofficial and undocumented set of stories and folklore in programming. From kids illegally building the Graphing Calculator for Apple to Mel relentlessly optimizing his code around hardware drums. These stories are our lore. ...

Timothy Lister and Tom DeMarco didn’t include a bibliography in Peopleware, so I swept through the book and produced one for curious readers. (Sorry for the bad formatting. Here’s a life tip: never use a CMS that promises continued development. Just grab one that already works.) Free Articles Hawthorne Effect Denver International Airport Baggage Handling System The Satir Change Model, by Steven Smith IBM’s Black Team “Inside the Japanese Software Industry”, by Denji Tajima and Tomoo Matsubara ...

I just finished reading that old software classic, Peopleware. The first chapter is “Somewhere Today, a Project Is Failing,” and hooked me immediately. Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams, by Tim Lister & Tom DeMarco Chapter 15 talks about Leadership as Work Extraction v. Leadership as Service. This ties into what I know of management spans. For years MBAs thought that the ideal number of direct reports was around 5-7 (which matches what psychologists know about working memory), but the idea of increasing that number means that managers have to start leading instead of micromanaging. See this HBR paper: More Direct Reports Make Life Easier by Ron Ashkenas (HBR). ...

NEDD is a one day conference in Cambridge. It’s an inexpensive way to learn about the cutting edge of database research. These are my notes on each speaker. Large notes I wasn’t as out of my depth as I thought I was going to be. I owe it all to Distributed systems theory for the distributed systems engineer by Henry Robinson The storm blew open a locked door, but it wasn’t at a dramatic moment in a talk. Disappointed in god for the missed opportunity. ...

Joel Spolsky’s writing and opinions are evergreen, and his 2004 book The Best of Software Writing shows it. I’ve always been jealous of Joel Spolsky for being right all the damn time. His selection of articles for “The Best of Software Writing Volume I” shows off how prescient he constantly is. This book collects writings from 2003 and 2004, and almost every one could have been written today and be immediately relevant. ...