SoftwareMustReads
##The Rise Of Worse Is Better This excerpt from Lisp: Good News, Bad News, How to Win Big describes two divergant schools of thought regarding software language design, The MIT and New Jersey approaches. it defines two approaches when building software languages correctness(MIT) and ease-of-use(New Jersey). These divergant approaches to language design extend beyond language design and into software as a whole. This writing was chosen because I believe it helps describe a common pattern in our lives as software developers.
##The Mythical Man Month This excerpt from brook's collection of essays by the same name describes one of the critical problems that we face within software, time estimates. In particular Brook makes the realization that adding more people to an already late project will only increase lateness. This writing is full of wisdom gained from years of experience as a software developer. I chose this piece because it is an engineers best friend against the unfriendly manager, looking to pile more resources into a project.
##Stevey's Google Platform Rant This posting does a wonderful job describing the goal of creating a platform. The author describes in detail the origin and success of AWS, through its transformation of software into a platform. He describes not only this succesful change, but draws further comparison between Facebook and its competion, namely google plus. I chose this piece because it shows us that technical changes alone can lay the roadmap for future success against similiar products.
##Latency Matters This Blog post by high scalability describes the necessity of low latency systems, not just from a programming perspective, but from a sales and buisness perspective. In short, Amazon found that it lost 1% of its total sales volume for each additional 100ms of latency. This posting is great because it provide a buisness backed reason to care about software quality. Essays like these are important because it helps prove the value of high quality code to non-technical, buisness oriented bosses.