My previous post provoked an outpouring of suggestions of people to interview for my book Coders at Work, to have approximately three to four binary orders of magnitude more than I can possibly interview for the book. So I put together a web page with a bit of Javascript on it to help me sort through the names and build a short list of (for now) sixteen names. Since it’s a sort of an interesting exercise, and because I’m curious what other people think, I’ve put the page up on the Coders at Work website. If you want to try your hand at picking sixteen names out of the almost 256 nominees I’ve got, go for it1. I’ve also put up a comments page so people can submit suggestions and flames about the book in a more public forum than my email inbox.
1. I don’t have an easy way to test that page in IE but I’ve got a sneaking suspicion it doesn’t work properly. If anyone can confirm that, one way or another, that’d be helpful. Even more helpful would be if some Javascript/HTML wizard could tell me what I have to do to make it work portably.
Coders at Work website is up
June 19, 2007I’ve put up a preliminary web site for my in-progress book Coders at Work that I mentioned the other day at www.codersatwork.com. At the moment it consists of an ever growing but still somewhat arbitrary list of potential interview subjects and a tiny bit of information about each of them. I’m going to be adding names to this list fairly quickly and then getting to work filling out details about each person while also winnowing it down to a reasonable number to actually interview. So now’d be a good time to email me suggestions of programmers who you’d like to read an interview with. Or if there are folks already on my list that you’re particularly interested in, feel free to let me know why and to point me to good sources of information about them. The more background I have going in, the better the interviews are likely to be.
Slight change of plans
June 12, 2007In my first post to this blog I said I was working on a book about programming in groups. A few weeks ago I met with Gary Cornell the CEO of Apress and my editor on Practical Common Lisp to talk about my book idea. His reaction was, more or less, “That’s interesting but I’ve got another book you should do first.” So, as of today I’m working on a book, tentatively titled Coders at Work, which will be a collection of Q&A interviews with interesting programmers.1 It will also be a companion volume to Apress’s recently published Founders at Work by Jessica Livingston, which is a collection of interviews with founders of high-tech startups. I hope soon to have a web site set up where I’ll be putting up pages listing people I’m hoping to interview and collecting suggestions for possible subjects and questions to ask them. I’ll post here when it’s up. In the meantime, if there’s anyone you think would make an interesting interview subject or questions you think I should ask let me know.
1. I’ve been unofficially working on it more or less since I talked to Gary which is why I’ve been remiss in my posting here.
A billion monkeys can't be wrong 