Welcome to the home page for the 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know project, pearls of wisdom for programmers collected from leading practitioners. You can read through the Contributions Appearing in the Book plus the Other Edited Contributions, browse Contributions in Progress, view the list of Contributors, and also learn How to Become a Contributor. If you would simply like to comment on a contribution, please also read How to Become a Contributor as some of it applies to you.

There is no overarching narrative: The collection is intended simply to contain multiple and varied perspectives on what it is that contributors to the project feel programmers should know. This can be anything from code-focused advice to culture, from algorithm usage to agile thinking, from implementation know-how to professionalism, from style to substance, etc.

ActorScript is a general purpose programming language for implementing massive local and nonlocal concurrency.

With ArtRage you can paint with oils, sketch with pencils, sprinkle sparkling glitter and much more. Stencils and rulers let you create precise shapes or smooth curves and straight lines freehand. Tracing and Reference images let you load photos to recreate as paintings either by eye or by letting ArtRage select colors for you as you paint. For professional users, ArtRage offers Layers, Layer Groups and Layer Blend Modes compatible with the PSD file format.

Human beings, organizations and software projects share one important thing: they have no intrinsic goals.

A 17-minute presentation from John Gruber (Daring Fireball) on the application of Auteur theory to software design.

Lego RCX reverse engineering docs

Only members can participate in the workflows accessible through this portal: electing new committers, scheduling project reviews. But it turns out that anybody can explore the portal use cases.

To serve users, I want to promote the notion of "tinkerable software". Tinkerable software allows the dedicated amateur to tailor it to her needs, even though those needs were unanticipated by the software's builder. (Thus, a Preferences dialog doesn't cut it.) Emacs is the canonical example of tinkerable software.

filed under "systems I've been wanting to build myself for a long time..."

Hackystat is an open source framework for collection, analysis, visualization, interpretation, annotation, and dissemination of software development process and product data. The Hackystat Framework supports three software development communities:

Cakewalk 1.0 was the first music software I ever owned; still have the 5 1/4 floppy in the basement...

At OOPSLA, I'm planning to talk about NeoVictorian Computing. It's a big talk, with lots of side paths and a few surprises. I'm going to talk about why we in computing seem unhappy, and how we might fix it.

You’ve seen the videos, the weblog posts and the hype, and you’ve decided you’re going to re-implement your product in Rails (or Java, or .NET, or Erlang, etc.). Beware. This is a longer, harder, more failure-prone path than you expect.

Why is software in a never-ending state of crisis? Why do most projects end up horribly over-budget or cancelled or both? Why can't we ship code without bugs? Why, everyone asks, can't we build software the same way we build bridges?

Ardour is a digital audio workstation. You can use it to record, edit and mix multi-track audio. You can produce your own CDs, mix video soundtracks, or just experiment with new ideas about music and sound.

Renoise has a unique bottom-up approach to music making. With its vertical timeline and streamlined interface, Renoise lets you have direct control over the composition.

Numerology is a modular MIDI Sequencer for Mac OS X. It takes sequencing metaphors established by the analog sequencers of the 70's and places them in a structured and highly interactive software environment that encourages experimentation and improvisati

Bakefile is cross-platform, cross-compiler native makefiles generator. It takes compiler-independent description of build tasks as input and generates makefile (autoconf's Makefile.in, Visual C++ project, bcc etc.). development

The ubiquity of frustrating, unhelpful software interfaces has motivated decades of research into “Human-Computer Interaction.” In this paper, I suggest that the long-standing focus on “interaction” may be misguided.

Alan's speech was revelatory and was perhaps the most inspiring talk that I ever attended. I grew increasingly excited as he made one brilliant, insightful remark after another, and took out my notebook to write as much of it down as I could. Alan was art