Part of being a good software developer is keeping current with what people are saying in the community. There are many good articles out there on the Internet about the wide subject of computer programming. What articles have you found worth your time?
Please provide the article's title, author and a link if possible.
Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years by Peter Norvig.
A good article on what it takes to become a great programer and Peter Norvig's recipe for programming success.
The Free Lunch Is Over: A Fundamental Turn Toward Concurrency in Software by Herb Sutter.
The biggest sea change in software development since the OO revolution is knocking at the door, and its name is Concurrency.
Painless Functional Specifications, by Joel Spolsky. It's in four parts and all are good.
The Programmer Competency Matrix is an excellent reference to gauge your development skills.
It's a reminder that everyone has areas they can improve.
You have a really a bunch of very good ones here
Notably some of the already cited here ones, but also:
Looking back at them now, they're mostly oriented on functional programming, but I don't see Why functional programming matters. If I remember other ones on another topic, I'll put them in another post.
I do found many of the Object Mentor articles immensely useful.
Object Mentor Articles
The Cathedral and the Bazaar has several fun articles about the pioneering of Linux in the 90's.
Coding: It's Just Writing by Jeff Attwood.
A short article on writing style.
Go To Statement Considered Harmful by Edsger W. Dijkstra
Another excellent essay by Chris Brumme, this time on the gory inner details of the exception model in .NET.
Picture Hanging by Colin MacDonald.
This wonderful essay on picture hanging as an analogy to software development made a huge impression on me when I first read it. The relentless accumulation of facts is just as important as talent or skill.
Jan Mikovsky on the fractal nature of UI design problems. I spent a while writing code to deal with this :-)
A programmer's view of the Universe, part 1: The fish by Steve Yegge
Execution in the Kingdom of Nouns by Steve Yegge.
An essay that made me re-think my attitude towards OOP.
What Every Programmer Should Know About Memory [pdf] by Ulrich Drepper
What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic by Goldberg.
There is a PDF around
Personally, everyone should know about this one and What Every Programmer Should Know About Memory. They should make a yellow cover series with those!
"Being a Software Engineer in the Software Century" By: Barry Boehm Truly Inspirational
This is a good article on getting your first job offers.
Exploding Offer Season by Joel Spolsky.
Characterizing people as non-linear, first-order components in software development by Alistair Cockburn
This is very specific to Java development, but an excellent overview of memory management issues by Attila Szegedi. Makes me want to buy him a beer :)
A day in the life of a memory leak hunter
Anything in Hanselminutes, or Scott's Blog. Saved my ass ongoing quite a few times.
10 Useful Techniques To Improve Your User Interface Designs by Dmitry Fadeyev.
They Write The Right Stuff, a timeless article by Charles Fishman published in FastCompany 1996.
Effective Unit Testing by Tim Burns.
Careful programmers test early and test often.
How to be a Programmer: A Short, Comprehensive, and Personal Summary by Robert L. Read
«To be a good programmer is difficult and noble. The hardest part of making real a collective vision of a software project is dealing with one's coworkers and customers. Writing computer programs is important and takes great intelligence and skill. But it is really child's play compared to everything else that a good programmer must do to make a software system that succeeds for both the customer and myriad colleagues for whom she is partially responsible. In this essay I attempt to summarize as concisely as possible those things that I wish someone had explained to me when I was twenty-one.»
This blog post by a Google employee named Ben Sussman talks about how, due to the anonymous nature of the Internet, we programmers will accept nothing but perfection from ourselves and eachother. This is very different from other professions, where mistakes are expected to happen and people are expected to learn from them.
An insightful article about good software development practices - not strictly about programming as in writing code.
Continuous Integration by Martin Fowler
I remember this was somewhat eye-opening when first reading it a few years ago, and have later come to consider this stuff quite essential.
Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures
At least chapter 5 and 6 should be read by anyone in doing anything web related.
STEPS Toward The Reinvention of Programming
"The STEPS project is setting out to create “Moore’s Law Software”: a high-risk high-reward exploratory research effort to create a large-scope-and-range software system in 3-4 orders of magnitude less code than current practice."
Here's another article about good development practices, namely version control:
Version Control for Multiple Agile Teams by Henrik Kniberg, posted at InfoQ
From the introduction:
If we have several agile development teams working on the same codebase, how do we minimize the risk of stumbling over each other? How do we ensure that there always is a clean, releasable version at the end of each iteration? This paper describes an example of how to handle version control in an agile environment with multiple teams - it is the scheme that we migrated to at the company described in "Scrum and XP from the Trenches".
The article talks about using short-lived devel branches to achieve stable trunk, into which goes only stuff that is done. At my work, we've generally had good experiences of applying these ideas, with two scrum teams working on one codebase. There's some overhead about the extra branching and merging (some of which can be automated away), but having stable trunk, from where a release could be made at any time, is a big plus.
What Stack Overflow Can Teach You by Jeff Atwood.
This article describes eloquently the way that feedback helps you grow as a programmer, and shows how that is a key to success.
Six Styles for Usability Requirements by Soren Lauesen & Houman Younessi
I was looking into how to define usability as a requirement and came across this article. It is well written and was very helpful.
Abstract. A system can have adequate functionality, but inadequate usability because it is too difficult to use. The purpose of usability requirements is to guard against that. This paper shows six styles for usability requirements seen in practice or recommended by experts. For each style we discuss how we can verify the requirements, how we can use them during development, how we elicit the data for the specification, and to what extent the style covers the essence of usability.
Top 25 Most Dangerous Programming Errors
additionally: Do stackoverflow users agree with the CWE/SANS Top 25 most dangerous programming mistakes?
The beginning of Google. This must be the research with the biggest ROI of all times:
Fire And Motion by Joel Spolsky
It’s brief but true inspiration. Remember, long lines of code does not mean it’s a good program
The ones that appeared in PC Techniques... Jeff Duntemann's magazine.
You’ll Never Have Enough Cheese, Atwood (2004). More about interface design and making software than programming, but I like the metaphors.
I will recommend Martin Fowler's The new Methodology, it is a great article about Agile.
Pounding a Nail: Old Shoe or Glass Bottle by Alex Papadimoulis. Summary: programmers have a nasty habit of helping newbies write bad code instead of encouraging better programming practices.
The Complicators Gloves by Alex Papadimoulis. Summary: for any given problem, programmers have a nasty habit of overlooking simple solutions in favor of complicated, over-engineered, enterprisey solutions.
Its very surprising nobody posted this article from steve-yegge...
this inspired me to learn mathematics as a programmer...
http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/math-for-programmers.html