Adventures in Publishing

Years ago, I talked several dozen people into writing a chapter each about the open source applications they had built. We had a publisher lined up for the resulting book, but when we delivered the manuscript they said, “It’s too big—you’ll have to cut half of it.” I wasn’t willing to throw people’s hard work away, so in the end we self-published The Architecture of Open Source Applications.

Twelve years later, those chapters still get more visitors every day than It Will Never Work in Theory and this site (which hosts both of the Software Design by Example books) combined, which I guess goes to show that William Goldman was right: nobody knows anything.