Talk:Steve Maguire
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External links modified (January 2018)
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Concerns about "single source" and "close relationship with the subject" may be overblown
editI have no personal connection with Maguire, but happened on this biography because there is another (much younger) software developer of the same name. I do, however, admire his two books. "Writing Solid Code" (1993), which uses the C language - then THE language for serious application development - may be partially obsolete because many of the issues he raised (such as memory leaks, memory fragmentation and pointer problems) are now addressed robustly and transparently by more modern toolsets such as Java and .NET, and was never an issue with interpreted environments such as Python and R.
However, "Debugging the Development Process" (1994) remains a classic 25 years after it was written: it's up there with Fred Brooks' "The Mythical Man Month" and Jon Bentley's "Programming Pearls". I've bought and given away at least a dozen copies to friends and colleagues. The lessons in this book deal with the human aspect of software development as much as, or more than, the technical aspects. In this book, which is published by Microsoft Press, Maguire does not pull his punches, and delivers his advice in a direct, no-nonsense way. The book's first sentence is "This book might make Microsoft look bad." He discusses many counter-productive practices then prevalent there - including the Death March - which Microsoft since appears to have outgrown: at least, Microsoft Press did not censor him.
In other words, Maguire's contributions to the science of software development (at both Microsoft and elsewhere) would fully satisfy the requirement of prominence for a biography of a living (or deceased) person.