Back when figuring out software engineering and systems design was all the rage, Mel Conway's paper was a fave. His observation--that system designs tend to mimic the social structure of the development team--was critical when it came to understanding systems and their development. Now, I suspect that, 52 years later, the observation (based upon longitudinal studies) still holds and that the ways committees invent are still not understood.

Mel wrote an influential paper on coroutines and compilers, "Design of a Separable Transition-diagram Compiler", which included the first published explanation of the concept proposed organizing a compiler as a set of coroutines. Several compilers based upon his approach were built in the early 1970s at SRI and at consulting firm Polymorphic.

Mel also applied for and received US Patent 6272622, Dataflow Processing With Events, which expired in 2019. The patent is very broad and insightful.