Lunchtime Semaphore

Recently, I got more interested in the subtleties of different open source licenses. Luis Ibáñez pointed be to some books about that.

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The Wisdom of Crowds is one of the latest book I’ve read that got me thinking. The general idea of the book is now quite well-known: combining the decision of a great number of people can reach an optimal choice more reliably than relying on an expert. But there are also several examples that are worth mentioning.

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Just finished the book “Coders at work” from Peter Seibel where he interviewed some of the most accomplished coders/programmers in the art/craft/engineering/science of programming.

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I don’t know what make me buy this book a few years back: I was not using Ruby, had no planning to go for web development and never heard of Rails before. But flipping through the book in the bookshop made me realized that there had been some big changes in the way the web was working: sure, hacking some html and javascript everything is possible… in theory. In practice, a limit is quickly reached where it becomes prohibitive to make changes. That’s where framework such as Rails comes in the picture.

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That was in 2007, I was a bit frustrated with the Design Patterns book and was looking for more concrete examples. Design Patterns, from Gamma et al.,  is a great book, but required more experience than what I had at that time to get the proper understanding on when to use a given pattern.

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“An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.” Benjamin Franklin

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