“Absolutely amazing! A page turner, just like Harry Potter for the technically minded.” —Tobias Svensson from review at return 42;
“This book is so interesting I did 60 minutes on the treadmill yesterday instead of the usual 30 because I couldn’t stop reading.” —Joel Spolsky on Joel on Software
“Coders at Work should inspire readers to learn about the wider context of their craft and stop the reinvention of the proverbial wheel” —Vladimir Sedach from review at Slashdot
“Peter Seibel asks the sort of questions only a fellow programmer would ask. Reading this book may be the next best thing to chatting with these illustrious programmers in person.” —Ehud Lamm, Founder of Lambda the Ultimate - the programming languages weblog
“I highly recommend it.” —Andy Mulholland, CTO, Capgemini
“I have long known the names and of the work of about half of the programmers in Peter Seibel’s wonderful book, Coders at Work; and it is fascinating to read their ideas about their lives and their ideas about programming. Better yet, I have now learned about the lives and philosophies of the other half of the programmers in the book, whose systems were known to me but the programmers themselves were not. Anyone interested in computer programming and what makes a great computer programmer will enjoy this book.” —Dave Walden, original member of the BBN ARPANET team
“These are wonderful interviews and this looks to be a bible for any programmer who aspires to be better.” —Peter Christensen, Founder of GeekStack.com
“This book is dead sexy. When it comes out, you should definitely get a copy.” —Joseph F. Miklojcik III from review at jfm3> _
“Superb book!” —Prakash Swaminathan from review at CloudKnow
“Read it, because then you will know the greatest coding brains.” —Amit Shaw from review at Teleported Bits
“One of the other core questions Peter asks is, what books would you recommend to help a developer learn programming? For me, this book joins my short list—it takes you away from the limitations of learning within a single company or community, and shows you the breadth of experiences that can make someone a great developer.” —Marc Hedlund from review at O’Reilly Radar
“The range of topics covered is just astounding.” —Chris Hartjes from review at @TheKeyboard
Brad Fitzpatrick
Brad Fitzpatrick is the youngest person I interviewed and the only one who has never lived in a world without the Internet or personal computers. Born in 1980, he got an early start as a programmer, learning to program at age five on a home-built Apple II clone. By his teenage years the Internet revolution was in full swing and he was deep into it, building his first commercial web site while still in high school and starting work on the popular community site LiveJournal the summer before he went to college.
Keeping up with LiveJournal’s ever-growing popularity forced Fitzpatrick to learn the hard way about building scalable web sites and along the way he and the programmers at the company he founded, Danga Interactive, ended up building several pieces of open source software, including memcached, Perlbal, and MogileFS, which are now used on the servers of many of the world’s busiest web sites.
Fitzpatrick is a prototypical—if exceptionally accomplished—turn-of-the-century web programmer: his primary programming languages have been Perl and C, though he also works in Java, C++, Python, JavaScript, and C# as needed. And almost all the programming he does is somehow network-related, whether it’s building better back-end infrastructure for web sites, designing protocols and software to improve the way blog-reading software knows when blogs have been updated, or programming his cell phone to automatically open his garage door when he rides up on his motorcycle.
We talked about learning to program at the same age as he was reading Clifford the Big Red Dog, why he was glad he stayed in college while running LiveJournal, and how he learned not to be afraid of reading other people’s code.