Communications and the practitioner

professions board letter lems instead of today's solutions. In its first issue, Queue introduced itself as " a tonic for the hype weary, with a commitment to methodically dissect upcoming challenges while posing the same hard questions software developers ask themselves. " Over the years, Queue stayed true to this vision by having editorial content conceived of and written by software engineers themselves. This afforded the magazine a problem focus, but one that held fast to the reality of production systems. Striking this delicate balance required constant vigilance, but it made Queue many additions has been a new section , " Practice. " While readers may have not recognized this section per se, they have likely noticed its practitioner-oriented content, with articles on everything from the innards of GPUs and the mechanics of hard-drive failure to debugging AJAX and avoiding the contagious virulence of XML fever—and much in between. The story behind the Practice section merits some explanation, for it traces the history of the practitioner within ACM. There was a time in the not-too-distant past when practitioners felt largely indifferent about ACM: while practitioners grappled with thorny problems posing non-negotiable obstacles to shipping a product or deploying a system, ACM (and, dare we say, its flagship publication) could seem to be comfortably insulated in dreamy abstraction. Not that the practitioner was better served by anyone else: much content for the professional software engineer seemed to be either explicitly " for dummies " or shamelessly capitalizing on the latest fad—and often both. Several at ACM saw these two problems—ACM's lack of focus on the practitioner and the opportunity posed by the paucity of high-caliber practitioner content—and set out to address them with a new magazine. The result of this effort, ACM Queue, launched in March 2003 and was targeted toward the practitioner, but with an eye toward tomorrow's prob-a must-read for leading practitioners. The growing success of Queue coincided with another change at ACM: the remaking of Communications. There had long been a desire among ACM's leadership to refresh the venerable publication, and with everything about Communications being reconsidered, the time was perfect to rethink not just the relationship between Queue and Communications, but also the role of the practitioner within ACM itself. From this deliberation , the new Practice section was born: Queue retained its identity and its Web site, but also became an integral part of the new …