I was very pleased yesterday to receive a copy of the Japanese translation of Beautiful Code, along with a powder-blue t-shirt bearing the names of the contributors. My sincere thanks to Ryoko Akaike and everyone else involved in the project.
Jon Erickson has posted a video clip from the Beautiful Code panel held at SD West a couple of weeks ago. Michael Feathers, Jim Kent, Christopher Seiwald, Elliotte Harold, Ron Mak, and Alberto Savoia were there; wish I could have been too.
Later: the second installment is up now too.
Still later: the third installment is up as well.
Dr. Dobb’s Journal has announced the winners of the 18th annual Jolt Product Excellence and Productivity Awards at the SD West 2008 conference. The Jolt Awards recognize those products, books, and websites that have “jolted” the industry in past year. Winners are selected by a panel of judges consisting of industry insiders, columnists, and technology leaders. This year’s winners are:
My thanks again to everyone who contributed to the book (especially Andy O.) I think Frank would have been proud of us…
And here’s a picture of Andy Oram accepting the award from Amber Ankerholz while Robert X. Cringely looks on:
DDJ‘s Jon Erickson blogs about last night’s Beautiful Code panel session at SD West. I wish I could have been there — I’ve gotten to know several of the authors well, but have never actually met them in person.
I just got sales figures for Beautiful Code from O’Reilly: since its release last summer, it has raised more than US$38,000 for Amnesty International. My thanks once again to the authors, and to everyone at O’Reilly who helped make the project a reality — and, of course, to everyone who bought the book as well.
Scroll down on this page and play the video — I think it makes me look chunky, but Sadie says TV adds ten pounds…
From today’s post by Tim O’Reilly:
Beautiful Code, a collection of essays by master programmers about how they solved particularly hard problems, must have hit a nerve. It was our #9 bestselling title for the year, and the number one software engineering title industry-wide according to our analysis of Bookscan figures.
Finalists for the 2008 Jolt Awards have been announced, and I’m pleased to say that Beautiful Code is on the list. Thanks again to all the contributors for being so generous with their time; we’ll know in a month whether we’re going to share a “programmer’s Oscar”.
Beautiful Code made the Amazon Editors’ Top 10 Computers & Internet Books list for 2007.
It’s a small world: Andy Oram, my co-editor on Beautiful Code, just interviewed Brent Gorda, co-author of the first version of the Software Carpentry course, about the cluster challenge that’s running at Supercomputing’07. Don’t be fooled by the purple-on-black titles: this is a very cool idea. Students teams get fixed time (and fixed electrical power) to put together a cluster and run some benchmarks. Doing this earned you a PhD twenty years ago; ten years ago, it would have been a line item in a department’s budget. It’s now a contest for students, and I look forward to finding a cluster in the bottom of a cereal box before I die… 
Later: Brent has started blogging about the Cluster Challenge at O’Reilly’s ONLamp site. I’m looking forward to hearing how the teams do.
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