Software Engineering discussion

I recognize about 1/2 of the names in this book. I am not familiar with Jamie, but am familiar with some of the Netscape story. However, I found his experience with serious Lisp and Emacs development most interesting, although I am a vi guy. Jamie has experienced some major political issues in both his closed source and open source efforts.

These interviews are in-depth, and I think that this makes them both interesting and valuable. And, they are full of personal opinions and preferred working styles. I enjoyed reading about his views about C++ (bad), debug strategies (print statements are sometimes more productive than GDB), unit testing (he does not so much formal testing), higher education (he probably wished he had done more).

For me reading such a book as interesting as speaking with or listen to someone who’s passionate about any kind of engineering, science, or software development and enjoys talking about it.

I’ve never heard about Jamie Zawinski, and to be honest many other people in this book, but it was definitely interesting to read about his views about software development, as he was the one of developers who worked at Netscape Communications on a browser that I used a while ago. He seems like one of those people who just dives into the code and looks at things from inside out. Maybe that’s the reason he didn’t like Design Patterns book and C++ in general:) For me most interesting was reading about his memories about people he used to work with and a piece of Netscape history, and how software was developed there while rushing to deliver features first to the market.