Pre-Birthday Festivities

Friday, October 6, 1995 by Dave Winer.

It's funny -- when I was at the Windows 95 rollout in August, almost every Microsoft person I ran into asked how much time I spend writing DaveNet pieces. I wondered why they were asking (I didn't ask). I assumed they were trying to figure out if I was spending much time writing software.

I *was* writing software, but not with the intensity of the current effort. There's a huge difference between the lifestyle programming I was doing for the first eight months of 1995 and the end-game mode I'm in now. It's fun, I'm accomplishing a lot. But there's less time to write essays.

Programming is still mostly a mysterious art because so few programmers write about their experiences. I hope when I pop up for air on this project I'll remember some of the lessons that I've been relearning. This is my tenth commercial release. There's a lot I can explain about the process of shipping software. In many ways it's the most ambitious I've ever attempted. That's OK, that's always the way it works.

This afternoon I'm visiting Jean-Louis Gassee, jlg@be.com, to see what all the BeBox talk is about. It might make a fitting report for the one year anniversary of DaveNet, which is tomorrow! Flowers, virtual or otherwise, would be very welcome.

And let me be the first -- Happy Birthday DaveNet!

It's been a great year, let's hope the next year is also a great one.

Without any fear!

Dave

PS: I've been listening to The John Lennon Collection CD -- it's totally great music. There are a lot of Lennon songs I had never heard. It's as good as any Beatles collection. Lennon had a very open loving heart, and he didn't mind sharing his life experiences. These songs are mosly tear-jerkers, made even more moving because of his tragic death.

PPS: One of the few inside treatments of the development process is Writing Solid Code by Steve Maguire, published by Microsoft Press. It's an insider's book, written by programmers for programmers. But it's extremely well-written and could be interesting to DaveNet readers.