The shelf life of software development books is typically two or three years, maybe five or ten years for a “classic.” Frederick Brooks, however, wrote a book on software development in 1975 that remains a best-seller: The Mythical Man-Month. His book has remained popular because he wrote about human nature as applied to software development, […]
Currying is a simple but useful idea. (It’s named after logician Haskell Curry [1] and has nothing to do with spicy cuisine.) If you have a function of two variables, you can think of it as a function of one variable that returns a function of one variable. So starting with a function f(x, y), […]
When you add people to a project, the total productivity of the team as a whole may go up, but the productivity per person usually goes down. Someone suggested that as a rule of thumb, a company needs to triple its number of employees to double its productivity. Fred Brooks summarized this saying “Many hands […]
“If you just rely on one model, you tend to amputate reality to make it fit your model.” — David Brooks Related posts Black Swan talk Advantages of crude models Occam’s razor and Bayes’ theorem
One of my favorite features of Mac laptops is two-finger scrolling. This lets you scroll down a long document similar to the way the middle wheel does on a Windows mouse. I mentioned on Twitter this evening that it would be nice if Windows had this feature. Apparently many newer Windows laptops come with this […]
Seven Nine people I have interviewed: Rick Richter, CIO of Food for the Hungry Eric Floehr, owner of ForecastWatch Frederick Brooks, computer pioneer and author Robert Ghrist, applied topologist Cliff Pickover, mathematician and author Dan Bricklin, software developer and author Carl Franklin, musician and software developer Michael Hammer, GIMP developer and author (new) Sacha Chua, […]
Here are six people I have interviewed. Rick Richter, CIO of Food for the Hungry Robert Ghrist, applied topologist Carl Franklin, musician and software developer Frederick Brooks, computer pioneer and author Cliff Pickover, mathematician and author Dan Bricklin, software developer and author Vincent Tan interviewed me here.
The August 2010 issue of Wired has an interview with Fred Brooks. The interviewer, Kevin Kelly, asks Brooks why he wrote his popular book The Mythical Man-Month. Here’s Brooks’ response. As I was leaving IBM, Thomas Watson, Jr. asked me, “You’ve run the hardware part of the IBM 360, and you’re run the software part; […]
In his book The Design of Design, Frederick Brooks describes his most productive decision as a manager at IBM. My most productive single act as an IBM manager had nothing to do with product development. It was sending a promising engineer to go as a full-time IBM employee in mid-career to the University of Michigan […]
Frederick Brooks is best known as the author of The Mythical Man-Month, a book on software project management first written in 1975 and still popular 35 years later. Brooks has a new collection of essays entitled The Design of Design that was just released this month. In his chapter on collaboration in design, Brooks notes […]
