An old publication more relevant now than ever - The Cathedral and the Bazaar. A comparison of software practices in the early 2000s with some retrospective to how great software is built.
I think much of the writing can be applied to today’s federated content models.
In particular:
- The Mail Must Get Through
- Necessary Preconditions for the Bazaar Style
- The Importance of Having Users
Fediverse is Bizarre Bazaar
Browsing post with phone in front of the book between my eyes and shelf ATM
fuck ESR
all my homies hate ESR
He went from a let-and-let-live, free-loving libertarian; to a more “kooky” libertarian. IMO, he was more palatable 20 years ago than now; though it’s hard to top the fall-from-grace Stallman has had…
But also this for balance:
A Generation Lost In The Bazaar https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2349257
I honestly read this every year. There are some deep lessons there that are so important for software and product development in general. It gets better every time I read it.
Is there a place that has a list of classic programming articles like this? Such a fun read. I know PHK has another one of the design of Varnish vs Squid here https://varnish-cache.org/docs/trunk/phk/notes.html
