Joel on Bookware
Today, David Weinberger finally conceded that he fails to read my weblog with the attention and regularity that you do and he should. In a blog post obviously intended for me, and me alone, he writes,
"I would like to. I really would. I like it and I like you.
But we're now well past the point where any of us can keep up with all the blogs worth reading from the people worth keeping up with. Even with an aggregator.
I just can't do it any more.
I've been faking it for a while. Months. Maybe a year. If we've met and I look confused about something you told me, and if you said, "I blogged it," as if that should be explanation enough, I've made some excuse as if I read every one of your posts except that one.
The truth is, I probably haven't read your blog in weeks. Months maybe."
Dude, it's okay. I haven't read your blog since the Social Computing Symposium. And then, to be quite honest, I only visited your blog to see if you had taken a witty swipe at Redmond, or not. If you remember me saying "I blogged it," your memory fails you. Those words have never trickled off my tongue. Today, I accidentally clicked on your name while fumbling for a link to Dare Obasanjo in my blogroll. I was unsurprised to learn of the true depth of our blogstrangement. But again, it's okay. It's mutual.
Now Joel Spolsky, Joel I read. Joel is the MasterBlogger. As a former software writer myself, I can't wait to lay my keyboard-weary fingers on his new book, The Best Software Writing I: Selected and Introduced by Joel Spolsky. Here's his pitch,
"The software development world desperately needs better writing. If I have to read another 2000 page book about some class library written by 16 separate people in broken ESL, I’m going to flip out. If I see another hardback book about object oriented models written with dense faux-academic pretentiousness, I’m not going to shelve it any more in the Fog Creek library: it’s going right in the recycle bin. If I have to read another spirited attack on Microsoft’s buggy code by an enthusiastic nine year old Trekkie on Slashdot, I might just poke my eyes out with a sharpened pencil. Stop it, stop it, stop it!”
That's from my introduction to The Best Software Writing I: Selected and Introduced by Joel Spolsky , now in bookstores. It includes 29 great short pieces of brilliant, insightful, and often hysterically funny stuff about software. You can read the introduction here ."
And thus is born a new genre, the software developer's digest. I wonder how long it'll be before Raymond Chen's first book hits the shelves of Borders and the warehouse shelves at Amazon.
Comments
Anonymous
June 27, 2005
Videos of the presentations from the Second Annual Microsoft Social Computing Symposium are...Anonymous
June 30, 2005
Videos of the presentations from the Second Annual Microsoft Social Computing Symposium are...Anonymous
June 30, 2005
Videos of the presentations from the Second Annual Microsoft Social Computing Symposium are...Anonymous
May 31, 2009
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