No Silver Bullet in Healthcare

On November 17, 2022, Frederick Phillips Brooks Jr., a pioneer in the computer science world and 1999 recipient of the A.M. Turing Award, passed away. I accidentally stumbled upon Fred in an internal Google Health chat where a colleague gave a nod to his contributions over the years and referenced one of his most influential ones, "No Silver Bullet". A contribution that impacted not only him but very likely most, if not all, of the software development industry.

I spent the first hour of my day today reading through some of the highlights of No Silver Bullet (I'll read it in its entirety at some point), published in 1986, along with some reflections on it 20 years later in the 2008 Object-oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications (OOPSLA) panelist discussion. My rudimentary summaries of both in this article.