shiny!

When I got home, late last night, I was greeted by a parcel addressed to me that contained a book.

This is unusual, as out of the 5 or so books that are delivered to our house every day, 5 or so are addressed to my wife, who works as a writer and translator of fiction and advises publishers whether to buy the German language rights to a certain book and then have it translated. Since she also advises me on what to read, generously saving me the time to scrounge the internets and local bookstores (those few that are still left) for stuff that I might like, and then buys it for me, I just about never receive books in the mail. Already elated by such rare fortune I proceeded to open the parcel, to find in it my very own copy of O'Reilly's recently released "Beautiful Architecture".

The reason why they kindly sent me an unsolicited and free copy is that it contains a chapter written by Mirko Böhm and myself describing how the community processes in KDE shape systems such as Akonadi and ThreadWeaver and how the community is in turn shaped by them. We were very humbled to have been asked by Diomidis and Georgios, who assembled it, to contribute to this book, and happy to bring some aspects of the way we build beautiful software in KDE to a wider audience.

During the writing of the book I had a chance to read unfinished versions of most of the other chapters and was quite intrigued by all of them. The topics covered are very diverse, but all contributions are of high quality and an interesting read, I think. I'm very much looking forward to reading everything in its finished form and on paper, which I still much prefer to reading on screen. Of course I'm also hoping the book will do as well as its predecessor, "Beautiful Code". Hm, I might have just given away the very hidden agenda of this blog post. ;)

Let me thank Volker Krause, who has been leading the work on Akonadi that is described in our chapter of the book, for reading and improving our drafts with his feedback, and the KDE community at large for being beautiful. My appreciation of it has only increased through the process of describing some of its inner workings. I marvel at it every day, still.