Gavin's Reviews > The Best Software Writing I: Selected and Introduced by Joel Spolsky

Odd beast: a time capsule where half the items are of purely historical interest, and half are general and extremely wise arguments that are still not acted upon today. He had planned them to be annual collections, but they didn't happen, so this looks to represent more than one year's best.
Recent enough to tell us something about the internet, though with lots of anachronism. But it's more at the lexical level - "weblog", "Sociable media" - than the semantic.

Found (eminent media researcher) danah boyd ludicrous: she calls developers autistic, and calls people with several online identities multiple-personality disordered (a person is one person. So all their activities have to be one person!) Disappointing, typical social theory. She aggressively pushes a horrendous risky single-sign-in for all sites based on these shitty polemics and nothing else.

Contains helpful principles which will not age:, e.g. "if you can't understand the spec for a new technology, don't worry: nobody else will understand it either, and the technology won't be that important".

[Various]