I just finished reading Peter Seibel’s new book, Coders at Work.

I was a bit skeptical at first. I only picked the book because of the big names on the cover and because Peter Siebel’s Practical Common Lisp is one of my favourite books on learn-a-new-programming-language. I thought that a book filled only with interviews with some of the big names in our industry would feel a bit too much like an issue of Who Magazine, with completely irrelevant questions like “Are you a Mac or PC?”. I was terribly wrong. The book is amazing.

Peter does a great job in guiding the interviewees into telling us about how they got into the industry and how they do their thing. For me it was really good to see how pretty much every single person interviewed -regardless of tech platform, background or expertise- tries to somehow come up with short feedback cycles during development.

And that makes it really funny to look at Joel Spolsky’s article on the book. He should have read a bit more before writing such a misinformed article, pretty much all of the interviewees write some other form of specification –being that a test, formal proof or a “test program”- before or while writing the program.

My favourite interview was with Bernie Cosell. Bernie is an old school hacker, he was part of what became the ARPANET. The way he describes his work really maps to what I do, and it can probably be summarised in this quote:

Peter Seibel: Have you heard of refactoring?
Bernie Cosell: No, what is that?
Peter Seibel: What you just described.