Product: 0596001088

I came to this book expecting something more eloquent or profound. Instead the book has a series of observations from ESR based on his experience managing an open source project, fetchmail, while trying to extract and apply lessons from the Linux community:
- Good software starts by scratching a developer’s personal itch.
- Great programmers know what to reuse.
- Plan to throw one away (Fred Brooks).
- If you have the right attitude interesting problems will find you.
- When you lose interest in a program hand it off to a competent successor.
- Treat your users as co-developers.
- Release early. Release often.
- Given a large enough beta-tester base every problem will be obvious to someone.
- Smart data structure and dumb code works best.
- If you trust your beta testers they will become valuable.
- Recognizing good user ideas can be better than having your own.
- Often the most innovative solutions come from realizing your concept was wrong.
- Design perfection is achieved when there is nothing to take away (Antoine de Saint Exupery).
- When writing gateway software never throw anything away you don’t have to.
- When your language is not Turing complete syntactic sugar is your friend(!?)
- A security system is only as secure as its secret.
- To solve an interesting problem, first find something interesting to you.
The text is under 80 pages and feels dated from the mid-90s when it was written, perhaps it seemed more insightful then.
Rating: 3
0596001088
Count: 15