In my previous article, I reviewed a book about medieval technology. In my inaugural article, I mentioned that I would be talking about books “dating back to medieval times”. You probably thought that now I had staked out my temporal limits, and would return to less remote eras going forward…

In my inaugural post for this series, I committed to exploring the “intersection of technology and social” in an expansive way — not limiting “technology” to software. And then my first book report was about programmer productivity. …

I was surprised (and delighted) when this year’s Monktoberfest had two talks on developer productivity — both from the Developer Success Lab. Developer productivity used to be a popular research topic in the 1970s and 1980s, but thereafter faded into obscurity. Many of the books that I have on developer…

I recently returned from the Monktoberfest, and (as always) I came back inspired. The Monktoberfest (as the subheading summarizes) is a conference about the intersection of social and technology. There were (as always) many inspirational talks and interactions. Somewhere along the way I noticed that I have a large collection…

Last week I published a screed about software politics. I received lots of comments — thank you all for that. The responses were, for the most part, thought-provoking and invigorating. There was one comment in particular which I feel compelled to address. Several people took me to task for saying…

Recently, I was quoted in an interview at uses this saying I decided to stop using open source software whenever possible and use any available alternatives… After publication, I received an inquiry asking me to explain my reasoning — and this essay is my explanation. This explanation is narrowly focused…

Almost forty years ago, in 1985, the idea of “Free Software” was born. That is not to say that the idea of sharing software with colleagues and making source code available was born. Ten years before the GNU Manifesto and the Free Software Foundation, I worked at a cloud services…