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Pieter Hintjens is a writer, programmer and thinker who has spent decades building large software systems and on-line communities, which he describes as "Living Systems". He is an expert in distributed computing, having written over 30 protocols and distributed software systems. He designed AMQP in 2004, and founded the ZeroMQ free software project in 2007.

He is the author of the O'Reilly ZeroMQ book, "Culture and Empire", "The Psychopath Code", "Social Architecture", and "Confessions of a Necromancer." In April 2016 he was diagnosed with terminal metastasis of a previous cancer.

How to Make Money from Open Source
There are, it has been said, two ways to make really large-scale software. Option One is to throw massive amounts of money and problems at empires of smart people, and hope that what emerges is not yet another career killer. If you're very lucky, and are building on lots of experience, and have kept your teams solid, and are not aiming for technical brilliance, and are furthermore incredibly lucky, it works.

18 Sep 2012 11:02 | 0 Comments | 0

The End of Stable Releases?
The C4 process we adopted some time back for ZeroMQ (except our dependency on Jira), CZMQ, and some other projects, looks like it's working as planned. But the drama of science lies in the extremes. If we really can reduce change latency to almost zero using C4, how does this affect how we deliver stable releases?

25 May 2012 17:01 | 0 Comments | 0

The Myth of Intelligent Design
The dominant theory of design is that you take smart, creative people and money, and produce amazing products. The smarter the people, the better the results. I'm going to claim that theory is bogus and based on a quasi-religious model of the "inventor" and "invention" as a function of individual minds. As an alternative I'll present the Theory of Heuristic Innovation, which states roughly that we do not invent solutions, we discover them, and that discovery process can be highly automated.

10 May 2012 21:10 | 0 Comments | 0

Good, Cheap, and Fast - PC3
The Pedantic Code Construction Contract (PC3) is an evolution of the GitHub Fork + Pull Model, and the ZeroMQ C4 process, aimed at providing an optimal collaboration model for commercial software projects. PC3 helps an organization build consistently good software, cheaply, and rapidly.

29 Mar 2012 16:12 | 0 Comments | 0

The Lazy Perfectionist and other Patterns
In this article I'm presenting a series of patterns for success in software engineering. These patterns aim to capture the essence of what divides glorious success from tragic failure. They were described as "religious maniacal dogma" by a manager, and "anything else would be fucking insane" by a colleague, in a single day. For me, they are science, the results of decades of trial by error. Treat the Lazy Perfectionist and others as tools to use, sharpen, and throw away if something better comes along.

01 Mar 2012 20:00 | 2 Comments | 0

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