I wrote a book.

[Aaron Evans]

Awesome Max!
I loved reading your blog posts on the Code Simplicity and appreciate 
your leadership on Bugzilla.
I ordered mine.

-Aaron
@fijiaaron

On 3/28/2012 2:05 PM, Max Kanat-Alexander wrote:
> 	Hey Bugzilla developers. You may have noticed that I haven't been
> around quite as much as I used to be. Well, it's true that part of that
> is because I got this great job at Google which I really love, and I've
> been working a lot there. But also, I've been spending a lot of my time
> *not* at work on something completely different: I wrote a book.
>
> 	During my years on the Bugzilla Project, many (or perhaps all) of you
> may have noticed that I'm very intense when it comes to code quality--I
> really care a lot about the architecture of a system, and I have some
> pretty strong ideas about code complexity. I've spent perhaps more time
> refactoring Bugzilla (and helping others refactor) than any other work
> I've done on it. Well, for many of the years I was doing this, what I
> was also doing was testing and refining a series of principles about
> software development as a whole. I could try out an idea, apply it to
> the Bugzilla codebase, and see how things went over time in an actual
> software project that was broadly-used but needed a lot of code
> improvements. I learned what works and what doesn't. Then I took these
> ideas out for broader testing in numerous ways, and what I eventually
> came up with was a series of laws for software development.
>
> 	I compiled these laws and a series of other software development
> guidelines into a book that I called "Code Simplicity: The Science of
> Software Development." One of the hardest parts was finding a simple
> logical sequence to explain everything in, simplifying all the
> information so that it could be understood easily, and determining the
> exact phrasing for each piece of critical text in the book. All told,
> that process took almost three years.
>
> 	Then I looked around and wondered, "Has anybody written this book
> already?" After all, had there been some other work in the field that
> was equivalent, I would have just gotten behind that and promoted it,
> instead. But much to my surprise, nothing equivalent already existed.
> There are some books that give some good tips on development or about
> specific languages, but *nothing* that covered the basic principles of
> software development as a whole.
>
> 	Then, last Fall, we shopped the book around to various publishers, and
> much to my excitement, O'Reilly said that they were highly interested
> and would love to publish my book. Several months later, and here we
> are--the book has been published and is available for all e-readers and
> in print form from most major online book retailers. In fact, if you
> want to get it, it's on sale until April 4 at oreilly.com for 50% off,
> which is a hugely good deal:
>
> 	http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920022251.do
>
> 	So why am I writing to the Bugzilla developers about this? Well, first,
> because I want to thank you. In fact, you're one of the few groups of
> people explicitly thanked in the Acknowledgments section of the book,
> because your contributions to Bugzilla and your discussions with me over
> the years really helped me shape the content of first my blog and then
> the book as it is today. But also, I wrote the book because I wanted to
> be able to pass on a series of principles, the ideas that I was
> operating off of when I was helping to improve the quality of the
> Bugzilla codebase. I want to see these sorts of improvements happen
> everywhere and have them be driven by everybody. I want to give back to
> the Bugzilla community as a whole, not just with short snippets of
> emails, a few Wiki pages here and there, or some blog posts, but with
> complete work of all the fundamental ideas.
>
> 	So here you have it. If I had numerous free copies, I would actually
> send one to many of you. But I don't, and so the best that I can do is
> to let you guys know about the existence of the book while it's on sale
> at such a hugely good price. It is my dear hope that it helps you in
> some way not just as individual programmers, but as the Bugzilla
> community as a whole.
>
> 	-Max