Several developers have made top ten CF posts for this year, including Rob Brooks-Bilson (http://www.brooks-bilson.com/blogs/rob/index.cfm/2005/12/23/The-Top-ColdFusion-Blog-Posts-of-2005). Rather than repeating links to such excellent CF bloggers as Sean Corfield, Ray Camden, Joe Rinehart, Dave Ross, Barney Boisvert, Matt Woodward, Jared Rypka-Hauer, Chris Scott, Dave Shuck, and, of course, Rob himself, I thought I'd offer ten of my favorite blog entries on software-related issues, rather than ColdFusion-specific. Although most of these are blogs, some are interviews and others are articles. In no particular order, they are...

1. Martin Fowler on humane interfaces(http://martinfowler.com/bliki/HumaneInterface.html). Martin is a highly respected writer on software architecture and design patterns. In this post, he talks about the need to create APIs that are human-centric.

2. Bill Venner's interview with Erich Gamma (http://www.artima.com/lejava/articles/patterns_practice.html). Erich is one of the "Gang of Four" who introduced the programming world to design patterns. In this interview, he discusses the intentions and tradeoffs of design patterns.

3. Joel Spolsky's insightful discussion into "making code look wrong" (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Wrong.html) and a brilliant defense (at least it convinced me!) of the value of Hungarian notation.

4. Meilir Page Jones "The Seven Stages of Expertise in Software Engineering" (http://www.waysys.com/ws_content_al_sse.html). This is so brilliant and so funny that I cannot imagine anyone reading this without getting a great deal out of it.

5. Nathaniel Talbott's thoughts on software, the Long Tail, and Ruby on Rails(http://blog.talbott.ws/pages/the_railroad_then_and_now.html).

6. Dion Hinchcliffe's "Best Web 2.0 Software of 2005" blog definitely deserves a read(http://web2.wsj2.com/the_best_web_20_software_of_2005.htm).

7. Paul Graham's "The One Hundred Year Language" is actually from last year, but it's so good, I had to include it(http://www.paulgraham.com/hundred.html). In this article, Paul talks about the evolution of and outlook for computer languages.

8. Ward Cunningham's discussion of simplicity with Bill Venners (http://www.artima.com/intv/simplest.html) is powerful stuff -- and sets right a misconception about one part of XP.

9. Daniel Read's "Specialties and Strategies" (http://www.developerdotstar.com/mag/articles/read_strategies1.html) on making choices in your programming career is very good.

10. My last choice is Martin Fowler's discussion of type safety (http://martinfowler.com/bliki/DynamicTyping.html) , a very important topic to ColdFusion developers.