Amy Brown - The Architecture Of Open Source Applications, Volume II

In the introduction to Volume 1 of this series, we wrote:

In the year since that book appeared, over two dozen people have worked hard to create the sequel you have in your hands. They have done so because they believe, as we do, that software design can and should be taught by examplethat the best way to learn how think like an expert is to study how experts think. From web servers and compilers through health record management systems to the infrastructure that Mozilla uses to get Firefox out the door, there are lessons all around us. We hope that by collecting some of them together in this book, we can help you become a better developer.

Amy Brown and Greg Wilson

Andrew Alexeev (): Andrew is a co-founder of Nginx, Inc.the company behind nginx. Prior to joining Nginx, Inc. at the beginning of 2011, Andrew worked in the Internet industry and in a variety of ICT divisions for enterprises. Andrew holds a diploma in Electronics from St. Petersburg Electrotechnical University and an executive MBA from Antwerp Management School.

Chris AtLee (.

Michael Bayer (): Michael Bayer has been working with open source software and databases since the mid-1990s. Today he's active in the Python community, working to spread good software practices to an ever wider audience. Follow Mike on Twitter at @zzzeek .

Lukas Blakk (.

Amy Brown (editorial): Amy worked in the software industry for ten years before quitting to create a freelance editing and book production business. She has an underused degree in Math from the University of Waterloo. She can be found online at http://www.amyrbrown.ca/.

Michael Droettboom (): Michael Droettboom works for STScI developing science and calibration software for the Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes. He has worked on the matplotlib project since 2007.

Elizabeth Flanagan (.

Jeff Hardy (.

Sumana Harihareswara (.

Tim Hunt ( and can be found @tim_hunt on Twitter.

John Hunter (): John Hunter is a Quantitative Analyst at TradeLink Securities. He received his doctorate in neurobiology at the University of Chicago for experimental and numerical modeling work on synchronization, and continued his work on synchronization processes as a postdoc in Neurology working on epilepsy. He left academia for quantitative finance in 2005. An avid Python programmer and lecturer in scientific computing in Python, he is original author and lead developer of the scientific visualization package matplotlib.

Luis Ibez (): Luis has worked for 12 years on the development of the Insight Toolkit (ITK), an open source library for medical imaging analysis. Luis is a strong supporter of open access and the revival of reproducibility verification in scientific publishing. Luis has been teaching a course on Open Source Software Practices at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute since 2007.

Mike Kamermans (.

Luke Kanies (): Luke founded Puppet and Puppet Labs in 2005 out of fear and desperation, with the goal of producing better operations tools and changing how we manage systems. He has been publishing and speaking on his work in Unix administration since 1997, focusing on development since 2001. He has developed and published multiple simple sysadmin tools and contributed to established products like Cfengine, and has presented on Puppet and other tools around the world, including at OSCON, LISA, Linux.Conf.au, and FOSS.in. His work with Puppet has been an important part of DevOps and delivering on the promise of cloud computing.

Brad King (): Brad King joined Kitware as a founding member of the Software Process group. He earned a PhD in Computer Science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He is one of the original developers of the Insight Toolkit (ITK), an open source library for medical imaging analysis. At Kitware Dr. King's work focuses on methods and tools for open source software development. He is a core developer of CMake and has made contributions to many open source projects including VTK and ParaView.

Simon Marlow (): Simon Marlow is a developer at Microsoft Research's Cambridge lab, and for the last 14 years has been doing research and development using Haskell. He is one of the lead developers of the Glasgow Haskell Compiler, and amongst other things is responsible for its runtime system. Recently, Simon's main focus has been on providing great support for concurrent and parallel programming with Haskell. Simon can be reached via @simonmar on Twitter, or +Simon Marlow on Google+.

Kate Matsudaira (.

Jessica McKellar (.

John O'Duinn (.

Guillaume Paumier (.

Benjamin Peterson (.

Simon Peyton Jones (

Susan Potter (): Susan is a polyglot software developer with a penchant for skepticism. She has been designing, developing and deploying distributed trading services and applications since 1996, recently switching to building multi-tenant systems for software firms. Susan is a passionate power user of Git, Linux, and Vim. You can find her tweeting random thoughts on Erlang, Haskell, Scala, and (of course) Git @SusanPotter .

Eric Raymond (): Eric S. Raymond is a wandering anthropologist and trouble-making philosopher. He's written some code, too. If you're not laughing by now, why are you reading this book?

Jennifer Ruttan (): Jennifer Ruttan lives in Toronto. Since graduating from the University of Toronto with a degree in Computer Science, she has worked as a software engineer for Indivica, a company devoted to improving patient health care through the use of new technology. Follow her on Twitter @jenruttan .

Stan Shebs (): Stan has had open source as his day job since 1989, when a colleague at Apple needed a compiler to generate code for an experimental VM and GCC 1.31 was conveniently at hand. After following up with the oft-disbelieved Mac System 7 port of GCC (it was the experiment's control case), Stan went to Cygnus Support, where he maintained GDB for the FSF and helped on many embedded tools projects. Returning to Apple in 2000, he worked on GCC and GDB for Mac OS X. A short time at Mozilla preceded a jump to CodeSourcery, now part of Mentor Graphics, where he continues to develop new features for GDB. Stan's professorial tone is explained by his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Utah.