Russell Beattie

From Victor's blog:

Internet Application Workbook. One of the best computer-related books that I've read lately is Philip Greenspun's Internet Application Workbook. The text was written as a guide for a MIT course. I love it because it has a very high level vision of how you should develop community-based projects. But at the same time, it gives lots of thoughtful practical tips.

Greenspun is better know as founder of Photo.net and ArsDigita (a computer company �abulously successful and profitable right up until the day that we accepted venture capital�). An excerpt from the last chapter shows an ode to blogging:

�Also keep in mind that for every person reading this chapter a poor villager in India is learning SQL and Java. A big salary can evaporate quickly. Hundreds of thousands of American aerospace engineers laid off in the 1970s discovered this. The ones who'd toiled in obscurity on "landing gear bolt #39" ended up as cab drivers or greeters at Walmart. A personal professional reputaton, by contrast, is a bit harder to build than the big salary but also harder to lose. If you don't invest some time in writing (prose, not code), however, you'll never have any reputation outside your immediate circle of colleagues, who themselves may end up working at McDonald's and be unable to help you get an engineering job during a recession�.

Possibly, one of the best advices a programmer can hear. [Binnacle Notebook]

Wow, that's a kick ass quote... And VERY VERY Frightening, if you think about the numbers on the chart below. At one point there were programmers FILLING all those 55,000 job openings, and now? Where are they? Oof that trips me out.

Here's the text to the book - I'll have to download this to save in my documentation folder... ;-)

-Russ