"Influential" can be tricky to pin down, but a couple of books that made a big impact on me at a certain age were "Prometheus Rising" by Robert Anton Wilson and "The Muse in the Machine: computers and creative thought" by David Gelernter. (The latter arguably counts as a technology book, since it's supposed to be about AI, but it's more to do with psychology and literature.)
More recent sorta/kinda philosophy: "The Craftsman" by Richard Sennett; "From Novice to Expert: excellence and power in clinical nursing practice" by Patricia Benner; "The Craft of Thought: meditation, rhetoric, and the making of images, 400-1200" by Mary Carruthers.
I also like to think that "Asterix in Britain" by Goscinny and Uderzo had a formative influence on me...
My guess is that this might be cycling related; that an area where there's likely to be public-spirited cyclists with GPS devices is well placed to get good OSM coverage.
In support of my theory, I point to Cambridge being a little bit of a hotspot in the southeast of England. (Not so much as Clacton though ... hmmm ... maybe the theory needs some work.)
I can't quite make up my mind whether its irony, or the other half of the same phenomenon, that humanities are feeling pressure to become more business-like whilst businesses are being drawn towards methods from the humanities.
> What makes you say that this was the "original intent" of patents?
The original meaning of the word "patent" might be a bit of a clue here.
The problem that patents tried to solve was of people keeping their innovations secret (in order to maintain an edge on their competitors), and that when they died their secrets died with them. Encouraging people to make public work they were doing anyway way, in the first instance, the way the patent system promoted progress.
Slightly off topic, but Peter Seibel's take on the idea of code reading groups, and the idea of code as literature, is interesting: http://www.gigamonkeys.com/code-reading/
"Code is not literature and we are not readers. Rather, interesting pieces of code are specimens and we are naturalists. So instead of trying to pick out a piece of code and reading it and then discussing it like a bunch of Comp Lit. grad students, I think a better model is for one of us to play the role of a 19th century naturalist returning from a trip to some exotic island to present to the local scientific society a discussion of the crazy beetles they found."
The reason this is off topic is that it sounds like you were after interesting specimens anyway. I don't have any code examples as such, although if algorithms count I'm particularly fond of Tarjan's algorithm for finding strongly connected components in a directed graph, and the Burrows-Wheeler transform (as used in bzip).
On a related point, am I the only one who notices the language coming out of the Silicon Valley ecosystem (the war for talent, the need to identify star performers) and is reminded of Malcolm Gladwell's assessment of Enron's corporate culture (http://gladwell.com/the-talent-myth/)?
"Pragmatic Thinking and Learning" was Andy Hunt, but as he and Dave Thomas are kind of a double act I can see why you'd get mixed up.
As to your point about whether they wrote any books on 'agile' I think it could be argued either way. More specifically, whether or not "The Pragmatic Programmer" (the book they made their name with) counts as a book about 'agile' is an interesting question, and one that throws some light on the wider debate.
Although they sometimes talk about "pragmatic programming" as if it were a thing, in the same way as XP and Scrum, their approach was more one of giving a smorgasbord of potentially useful techniques and practices rather than codifying a tightly defined set of best practices.
There was a time when LinkedIn would often require you to re-enter you login details, seemingly at random. Login details consist, of course, of your email address plus a password, and so if you used the site much you kind of got used to entering them in every time they were requested.
The login form, unsurprisingly, looked very similar to the one suggesting that you give LinkedIn your email address plus you email account password. When I first noticed this, I thought that, for people who re-use passwords, this was an accident waiting to happen. I'm sure people must have been caught out by this.
I was very tempted to submit this to darkpatterns.org, but the first part of the pattern (frequent re-authentication) doesn't happen any more.
An odd thing about Alexander's work on pattern languages is that, despite people's enthusiasm, Alexander himself considered it to be a failure. There's a chapter in Richard Gabriel's "Patterns of Software" (http://dreamsongs.org/Files/PatternsOfSoftware.pdf) that has an interesting discussion on this.
Alexander considered his work prior to A Pattern Language to be a failure. Notes on the Synthesis of Form was largely his Phd work from Harvard, and his self-criticism was that the process was too formal.
My personal opinion is that it better corresponds to current software architectural practice because whereas A Pattern Language is entirely focused on habitability for end users, both current software architectural practice and Notes on the Synthesis of Form emphasize habitability for the architect/programmer - e.g. three tiered systems make the job of the programmer easier, they don't necessarily improve user experience, but light on two sides does.
Read Alexander's foreword to that book. He considers his earlier work to be a failure. In the sense that design patterns didn't work to allow people to make living buildings. However he seems to be very satisfied with his new Nature of Order series.
More recent sorta/kinda philosophy: "The Craftsman" by Richard Sennett; "From Novice to Expert: excellence and power in clinical nursing practice" by Patricia Benner; "The Craft of Thought: meditation, rhetoric, and the making of images, 400-1200" by Mary Carruthers.
I also like to think that "Asterix in Britain" by Goscinny and Uderzo had a formative influence on me...