Essays for Programmers

Published on 2020-11-10

Alan Turing is considered the father of Computer Science and a personal hero.

Peter Norvig “Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years” is a classic. Read it if you ever found yourself in a hurry to learn a new language or the most hyped Javascript framework.

Patrick Mckenzie on “Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names”.

More essays like this can be found on Awesome Falsehood.

Edgar Dijkstra: Go To Statement Considered Harmful. Meyer explains why “Considered Harmful” Essays are Considered Harmful.

Joel Spolsky on his “12 Steps to Better Code” shares his experiences on what we should measure to improve the quality of our own software team.

I also recommend reading “Can Your Programming Language do this”, “Getting your resume read”, “Advice for Computer Science College Students”, “Things you should never do” and “The Absolute Minimum Every Sofware Developer Absolutely Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets: No Excuses”

How to Build a Strong Career in Tech by Thiago Ghisi, this article is based on a excellent talk at The Conf. There is some great advice on how to manage your career that can be learned from this article.

Do you want to be a better leader? Put the effort into it. How? Do the work that nobody is doing but that is critical for success.

The more meetings you facilitate, the better you will be at it.

The more critical communication you do, the better you will be at it.

The more feedback you give, the more comfortable and skilled you will be next time you need to give feedback to someone.

Paul Graham is a programmer and investor who writes some of my favorite essays. A short list of the most influentional on my way of thinking:

Hackers and Painters - that is also the title of his book.

Hacking and painting have a lot in common. In fact, of all the different types of people I’ve known, hackers and painters are among the most alike.

Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule

Writing, Briefly and How to Write Usefully

I think it’s far more important to write well than most people realize. Writing doesn’t just communicate ideas; it generates them. If you’re bad at writing and don’t like to do it, you’ll miss out on most of the ideas writing would have generated.

On Why the next language you learn should be functional Yaron Minsky argues in favor of functional programming.

This blog post was inspired by Essays on programming I think about a lot.

Essays for Programmers

Hacking and painting have a lot in common. In fact, of all the different types of people I’ve known, hackers and painters are among the most alike.

I think it’s far more important to write well than most people realize. Writing doesn’t just communicate ideas; it generates them. If you’re bad at writing and don’t like to do it, you’ll miss out on most of the ideas writing would have generated.