Do you program? You need to read Steve Yegge.
Joel on Software. Paul Graham. Martin Fowler. Kathy Sierra.
If you are invovled in developing software and read blogs, you probably have heard of these folks. You might add Scoble, DHH, or Bray to that list, depending upon your language/platform of choice.
Even if you think Graham is a smug Lisp weenie or Joel’s software sucks, I bet you still read them. You read them because all of them are fantastic writers. They make the art of creating software absolutely fascinating, for nerds and non-nerds alike.
Meet Steve Yegge. If you frequent delicious/popular or reddit, you probably already have seen some of his essays, and maybe you’ve already dived into his site. He’s formerly a developer at Amazon and has created a free online game years ago that remains active (think Ultima IV crossed with a MUD). His writing started to get picked up on the memetrackers late year, and with good reason.
He compares programming languages, gives tips for effective phone screenings, and tells you how to practice programming (you do practice, right?). He bashes Perl, loves Ruby and does a nice tour of its features. He takes on the static vs dynamic debate, tells you why you should blog, recommends books, and surveys dynamic languages on the JVM.
A more recent essay rants about the current state of blog software. He bashes Typo, the leading Ruby on Rails blog package, for all the right reasons. I want Typo to succeed very badly, as it has so much potential. I just don’t see that happening anytime soon with the shared deployment issues, lack of documentaiton, and lack of a recent stable release. But thats a rant for another day…
So fire up the laser printer, visit Steve’s old site, and go nuts. Then add his new blog to your feadreader. Enjoy.