This post originally appeared on O’Reilly Radar (“A lever is always better than a lone coder“). It’s republished with permission.

By Mac Slocum

It’s time to abandon some old notions about programming.

For starters, advanced software cannot emerge from the mind of one programmer. There are simply too many pieces and too many needs that must be addressed. And that vision of the “lone coder” conjuring brilliance in a dark room? It simply doesn’t map to the realities of modern development. Programming is largely team-based — either in-person or virtual, official or ad hoc — and that means people need to communicate to get things done.

Brian Fitzpatrick (@therealfitz) and Ben Collins-Sussman (@sussman), authors of Team Geek and speakers at next week’s OSCON, discuss the intricacies of software collaboration and communication in the following interview. They also explain the difference between “leaders” and “managers” and they consider how the learn-to-code movement will shape future development teams.

In the introduction to the book, you note that a project’s success is equally dependent on writing great code and collaborating. When you initially arrived at that conclusion, what was your view on collaboration? Was that a pleasant realization?

Brian Fitzpatrick: It was something that we were doing, but not really giving a lot of thought to because it came naturally to us. We just saw collaboration merely as a part of getting things done. But when we started to think about it and discuss it, we realized that understanding how to work with people makes you a more efficient and more effective programmer. We understand that there are cases where you can brute force something through technical acumen alone, but there are many other situations where even that isn’t sufficient.

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• • Team Geek authors Brian Fitzpatrick and Ben Collins-Sussman discuss the nuances of modern programming in this interview.&submitCategory=news&submitAssetType=text" title="Share with Buzz Up!"> Buzz Up!
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This post originally appeared on O’Reilly Radar (“Big ethics for big data“). It’s republished with permission.

By Howard Wen

As the collection, organization and retention of data has become commonplace in modern business, the ethical implications behind big data have also gro