Richard P. Gabriel's Patterns of Software: Tales from the Software Community is the kind of book that Passages, as a column, aspires to bring back to the attention of the software community. I am fairly sure this book, from 1996, is largely forgotten, but I think it deserves a wide audience, to this day, because it has things to say that we still need to hear, and it says them well. It's not as obscure as some ''lost'' software books: it remains available in Kindle format, and is easily obtained (though it seems to be technically out of print) in hardback or softcover formats. However, the most recent review on Amazon is from April 2016, more than ten years ago, and I had never heard of the book until recently, when I was probing more deeply into the influence of Christopher Alexander's views on architecture on software engineering, trying to go beyond just ''everyone has read Design Patterns and knows about the visitor pattern, even people who don't care that much specifically about OO, like myself.''
It is with great sadness that I start out this article by acknowledging the passing of the first editor of SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes, Peter Neumann. In his honor, what follows is the last Letter from the Editor that Peter wrote for the October 1993 issue of ACM Software Engineering Notes (vol 18 no 4) (FWIW, I left in the spelling errors, since spell check wasn't around for LaTex in 1993.) This is followed by the first issue of SEN that I edited.
Software profoundly influences how we live and work, often reflecting human behavior and societal values. Consequently, software-intensive systems and software engineering technologies must be developed and deployed responsibly to avoid harming users, society, or the environment. This raises questions about what constitutes the responsible development and use of technology, including which human values and which social and environmental norms are embedded in software engineering practices and products. With the increased incorporation of AI in software-intensive systems, software engineers are confronted with even more ethical and moral choices to incorporate into these processes and products. To address these responsibility issues, the workshop hosted a half-day event featuring themed presentation tracks, interactive discussions, and a stimulating concluding panel. The workshop comprised research papers (visionary, exploratory, empirical, and solution-oriented) and industrial papers (lessons learned and challenges) published in the ACM workshop proceedings.
In this paper, we report on the outcomes of the Eighth Workshop on Modeling and Simulation of Software-Intensive Systems (MSSiS 2026), held in conjunction with the 48th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2026), in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on April 12th 2026. The workshop focused on the role of modeling and simulation in the engineering of next-generation software-intensive systems, and in particular, cyber-physical systems, including digital twins and AI-enabled environments.
BRIDGES 2026, the third edition of BRIdging the Divides with Globally Engineered Software that incorporated a Summer School, was held from January 9 to 11, 2026, at Loloata Island Resort near Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea (PNG). The school brought together students, local professionals, organizers, international speakers, and industry partners to explore innovative prototyping through AI-powered technologies and open source software. The event combined keynote talks, GitHub and AI tooling tutorials, a student hackathon, prototype presentations, and discussions about sustaining a local software engineering ecosystem. Overall, BRIDGES 2026 welcomed and supported 21 students and produced three open source prototypes addressing problems in the Papua New Guinean context. Website: https://bridges-png.github.io/.
