It's amazing this article was written so long ago. He had such foresight, it could almost have been written today--looking back.

"Of all the monsters that fill the nightmares of our folklore, none terrify more than werewolves, because they transform unexpectedly from the familiar into horrors. For these, one seeks bullets of silver that can magically lay them to rest.

"The familiar software project, at least as seen by the nontechnical manager, has something of this character; it is usually innocent and straightforward, but is capable of becoming a monster of missed schedules, blown budgets, and flawed products. So we hear desperate cries for a silver bullet--something to make software costs drop as rapidly as computer hardware costs do.

Like chess or painting or writing novels, making money is a very specialized skill. But for some reason we treat this skill differently. No one complains when a few people surpass all the rest at playing chess or writing novels, but when a few people make more money than the rest, we get editorials saying this is wrong.

The first computers were people! That is, electronic computers (and the earlier mechanical computers) were given this name because they performed the work that had previously been assigned to people. "Computer" was originally a job title: it was used to describe those human beings (predominantly women) whose job it was to perform the repetitive calculations required to compute such things as navigational tables, tide charts, and planetary positions for astronomical almanacs. Imagine you had a job where hour after hour, day after day, you were to do nothing but compute multiplications. Boredom would quickly set in, leading to carelessness, leading to mistakes. And even on your best days you wouldn't be producing answers very fast.

Eric Raymond learns that a company for which he's on the board of directors and has quite a few shares of stock, just had an outrageous IPO. Will it change his life?

This paper analyzes a model of software development in which closed-source applications make use of open-source artificial intelligence parts. We begin by observing that AI has a huge potential but that problems limit the development of applications.

This is an essay by Eric S. Raymond on software engineering methods, based on his observations of the Linux kernel development process and his experiences managing an open source project, fetchmail. It was first presented by the author at the Linux Kongress on May 27, 1997 and was published as part of a book of the same name in 1999.

From the introduction: "Have you ever heard of SEMA? It's a fairly esoteric system for measuring how good a software team is. No, wait! Don't follow that link! It will take you about six years just to understand that stuff.

Here is a collection of stories about software engineering. You don't have to be an engineer to enjoy these stories, but it might help to at least know one.

These essays by Jack W. Reeves offer three perspectives on a single theme, namely that programming is fundamentally a design activity and that the only final and true representation of "the design" is the source code itself.