I’m sorry that I wasn’t able to keep up a rigorous weekly schedule for Code Reads through the fall — too many conflicting demands. I’m getting serious now, though, and setting some dates down here. (Public commitments to deadlines always concentrate the mind.)

January will be something of an all-star month full of well-known classics in the field, in honor of the forthcoming publication of Dreaming in Code.

Later this week I’ll be posting the next Code Reads installment on David Parnas’s “Software Aspects of Strategic Defense Systems,” his 1985 essay about the Reagan-era Star Wars program, and why its software needs would doom it.

Next week (Jan. 8), we’ll look at Eric Raymond’s manifesto, The Cathedral and the Bazaar. Sure, you’ve heard of it, you know all about it — but when’s the last time you actually read it?

Then, the following week (Jan. 15), to mark the official launch of Dreaming in Code, we’ll take a look at the essay that I view as, if not the cornerstone of the entire field of software development, then certainly the distillation of the questions my book centers on: Frederick Brooks’ “No Silver Bullet.” We touched on some of the issues back when we started with “The Mythical Man-Month,” but “No Silver Bullet” spins quite a separate argument that’s worth grappling with on its own.

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