Ancient Hacker Knowledge

Every now and then I stumble upon some really cool old relics of past generation of hackers. These could early-days ruby developers, C programming hackers from the 90s, or even the early Unix-era programmers of the very early days.

Their collective wisdom, written into thoughtful blog posts, books, and code comments, offers us profound insights into fundamental computing concepts that remain surprisingly relevant in tackling today’s software engineering challenges.

Here are some resources:

• Hacker.txt (1993) - really, really well-stated definition of debugging strategy, as well as balancing features vs. deadline vs. quality.
• Rob Pike’s 5 Rules of Programming (1989)
• Big Ball of Mud (1999)