On Sun, Jan 16, 2005 at 10:56:28PM -0800, Donnie Berkholz wrote: > 5. Raymond, Eric. "The cathedral and the bazaar." Retrieved 9 Jan., 2005, from > > http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/.
This is a must-read, but if you lack the time, the concluding rules are:
1. Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch.
2. Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and
reuse).
3. ``Plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow.'' (Fred Brooks, The Mythical
Man-Month, Chapter 11)
4. If you have the right attitude, interesting problems will find you.
5. When you lose interest in a program, your last duty to it is to hand it off
to a competent successor.
6. Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code
improvement and effective debugging.
7. Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers.
8. Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem
will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone.
9. Smart data structures and dumb code works a lot better than the other way
around.
10. If you treat your beta-testers as if they're your most valuable resource,
they will respond by becoming your most valuable resource.
11. The next best thing to having good ideas is recognizing good ideas from your
users. Sometimes the latter is better.
12. Often, the most striking and innovative solutions come from realizing that
your concept of the problem was wrong.
13. ``Perfection (in design) is achieved not when there is nothing more to add,
but rather when there is nothing more to take away.''
14. Any tool should be useful in the expected way, but a truly great tool lends
itself to uses you never expected.
15. When writing gateway software of any kind, take pains to disturb the data
stream as little as possibleand never throw away information unless the
recipient forces you to!
16. When your language is nowhere near Turing-complete, syntactic sugar can be
your friend.
17. A security system is only as secure as its secret. Beware of pseudo-secrets.
18. To solve an interesting problem, start by finding a problem that is
interesting to you.
19: Provided the development coordinator has a communications medium at least as
good as the Internet, and knows how to lead without coercion, many heads are
inevitably better than one.
Noosphere rules:
1. If it doesn't work as well as I have been led to expect it will, it's no
goodno matter how clever and original it is.
2. Work that extends the noosphere is better than work that duplicates an
existing piece of functional territory.
3. Work that makes it into a major distribution is better than work that
doesn't. Work carried in all major distributions is most prestigious.
4. Utilization is the sincerest form of flattery and category killers are better
than also-rans.
5. Continued devotion to hard, boring work (like debugging, or writing
documentation) is more praiseworthy than cherrypicking the fun and easy
hacks.
6. Nontrivial extensions of function are better than low-level patches and
debugging.
Other than that, thanks for the overview.
Wkr,
Sven Vermeulen
--
Documentation & PR project leader
The Gentoo Project <<< http://www.gentoo.org >>>
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