Friday, September 4, 2009

"97 Things" Contribution

You may be familiar with O'Reilly's "97 Things" series, which currently consists
of "97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know" (
http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596522698/ ) and "97 Things Every Project Manager
Should Know" ( http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596804169/ ). There's now a
programmer-centric version in the works under the editorship of Kevlin Henney:
"97 Things Every Programmer Should Know;" wiki at
http://programmer.97things.oreilly.com/wiki/index.php/97_Things_Every_Programmer\
_Should_Know .

I was asked to write a contribution for this project, so I decided to revise my
2004 IEEE Software article to fit the "97 Things" length restriction of 500
words. The result is at
http://programmer.97things.oreilly.com/wiki/index.php/Make_Interfaces_Easy_to_Us\
e_Correctly_and_Hard_to_Use_Incorrectly . I hope you like this concentrated
version of my advice to "Make Interfaces easy to use correctly and hard to use
incorrectly," and I encourage you to look over the other articles at the
project's site -- and possibly even add your own.

Scott