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Gigamonkeys Quarterly

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40 pointszachbeane7 comments

I've been talking to Peter about this idea a bit, and I'm terrifically excited that he's planning on moving it forward. It seems strange that there's never been an open-source / code-culture periodical of record since the rise of the web, online or off.

With a little luck, and contributions from all of us (hopefully, Peter will have an open ear for story pitches), GQ could be for code what Make is for the DIY scene.

Here's some hypothetical articles I could imagine reading:

* A critical reading of The TeXbook.

* Bootstrap your own self-compiling mini-language.

* A brief history of asynchrony.

* Fun with Octrees.

* Visualizing strange attractors.

* A security analysis of the SHA-3 contenders.

What would you like to see?

As I said to him in an email, the code for papers being released along with the papers is a big one for me.

Interviews with more programmers than just the notable ones in Coders at Work, and also particular domain sections.

If I did something particularly cool with robots, I could publish a paper in an academic journal and have it be all hoidy-toidy and mathy and shit, and then publish the code and all the "yeah there was the math but I really just tweaked the config files" stories in GQ.

It could be the same with all the interesting implementation research, like graphics.

This sounds great. I'd recommend glancing over some of the earlier releases of the, sadly now defunct, Perl Journal.

I thought they absolutely nailed their target demographic with a great balance of practical programming tips, history/cultural pieces, and op-eds.

Here's a page with links to a bunch of Perl Journal PDFs, for the interested:

http://www.perlmonks.org/index.pl?node_id=711609

Based on his work for Coders at Work, I'm really looking forward to this.

Sounds like The Pragmatic Programmers Magazine: http://pragprog.com/magazines

I just have to say that actually, no, this doesn't sound like that at all. And thank goodness.

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