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Interesting Stories

Maybe I will write a book?

Many people have asked me to write a book about my experiences, how different ideas came up, what difficulties I faced, which interesting people I worked with, etc. With time these requests come more often. Unfortunately, I never feel that I can take the time to work on the past. Instead I spend my time on the next interesting things. I use my background and my experience to motivate the new things I work with. For instance, I have lately motivated my interest in aspect-oriented software development based on case studies I made twentyfive years ago.

However, in 1999 I met a journalist, Gretchen Allen, who became very interested in the work I have been doing. We met during year 2000 for about twenty hours, during which we recorded interviews. She made transcripts of these interviews which resulted in what we called "chapters". We were clearly thinking in the possibility of making a book out of these transcripts. In this way we got around twenty "chapters". However, none of them was really readable as is. They were transcripts of interviews so they didn't flow very well. They were filled of misunderstandings. But we had some raw material. I took four of these chapters and reworked them substantially. It took probably a day per "chapter". Now, for the first time I will make these chapters available. Let me hear your opinion about these pieces. Are they worth reading? They describe how we came up with components at Ericsson back in 1967.

Many funny situations occurred when we worked on UML. Here is one: