# Few of my favorite essays on software

**URL:** <https://discuss.dgraph.io/t/few-of-my-favorite-essays-on-software/587>\
**Category:** Misc\
**Created:** [July 20, 2016, 11:15am UTC](https://discuss.dgraph.io/t/few-of-my-favorite-essays-on-software/587 "2016-07-20T11:15:44Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
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**Author:** ![mohitranka](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex007/user_avatar/discuss.dgraph.io/mohitranka/32/1005_2.png) [@mohitranka](https://discuss.dgraph.io/u/mohitranka)\
**Post date:** [July 20, 2016, 11:15am UTC](https://discuss.dgraph.io/t/few-of-my-favorite-essays-on-software/587/1 "2016-07-20T11:15:44Z")

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Few of the essays that had significant impact on my software development point of view. I hope the team enjoys them as much as I did.

[Curse of the gifted](http://www.vanadac.com/~dajhorn/novelties/ESR%20-%20Curse%20Of%20The%20Gifted.html)([HN discussion](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7219872)) - Eric S. Raymond tells a certain Linus Torvalds about the importance of managing complexity.

[The complicator’s gloves](http://thedailywtf.com/articles/The_Complicator_0x27_s_Gloves) - Sometimes it is better to keep things simple.

[On unicode](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html) - Hands down the best primer on unicode handling. Having spent most of my career with a tool that uses `ascii` as default encoding I found myself referring it again and again.

[On rewriting software](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html) - A Joel Spolsky classic, talking about the evil of rewrite from scratch.

[The Zen of python](https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0020/#the-zen-of-python) - A misnomer - A more apt title would be actually be `The zen of software development, life and everything in between`. The ideas presented here are terse, and yet deep and powerful and applicable largely across any tool.

If you find these articles useful and per your taste, I may add more to this list.