It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything about Coders at Work. Last week I put up, but did not broadly announce, a new, improved web page for sorting the nearly 300 suggested names of people to interview I’ve received. I mostly created it for my own benefit but anyone who wants to play with it can feel free to make their own sorting. (I’m mostly announcing it now because I think it’s sort of a nifty UI — much more fun to play with that the previous one — though I am also interested to see how other folks would sort the list of names I’ve got. Unfortunately, like the previous sorter, this page probably doesn’t work in IE and is only known to work for sure in Firefox.) One feature of this page that the other short list selector didn’t have, is the ability to effectively down vote names — you can put folks who you are particularly uninterested in hearing from at the bottom of the list and that tells me something.

If you think you’ve got a sorting that would make for a great book, click the Save button then “Permalink” on the next page to get a URL for your specific sorting and send it to me. I’m also still interested in new suggestions of folks to interview though as I’m getting pretty close to starting to contact folks and since I’m ultimately only going to interview on the order of sixteen people, new names have to be pretty obviously better than over 250 of the names I’ve already got to break into serious contention. As always, I’m also interested in your comments about why you think someone would (or wouldn’t) make a good interview subject.

I’ve also started serious work on a set of general questions. So far I’ve got 191 questions in 22 categories. Which is a lot — obviously I’ll have to pare that down unless I’m going to interview people for 10 or 20 hours. And that’s not even counting questions more directly tailored to the individual subjects. But it’s still better to have too many than too few so if you’ve got a question you’d like me to ask either everyone I interview or specific people, feel free to email or leave it on the Coders at Work comment page.

Update: I didn’t mention before but you can see the combined results of everyone who has submitted a sort via this new page here.

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