For years I've been collecting quotations, including many quotations about software.

You might enjoy the poem Black Marigolds.

A few years ago I did some writing. I was fortunate enough to be one of the first few people outside Sun Microsystems to write a Java program, and at the time was writing a chapter for the second edition of The Internet Unleashed about the World Wide Web. (Remember when you could have a single chapter about the web? Or, for that matter, a single book that purported to cover the Internet?) I believe that chapter to be the first mention of Java in book form, and one of the earliest mentions of the language in any print medium.

Later that year, I served as the lead author for Tricks of the Java Programming Gurus. Despite the terrible title, I'm proud of the book—it was the first genuinely advanced Java book (too advanced, too early, as it turned out). The next year we revised it and changed the name to the somewhat better Maximum Java 1.1.

Since then, I've done a lot of speaking and almost no writing, and it doesn't look like I'll have the time to do much writing in the near future. But I do hope to do some writing again.