The Worst Idea of All Time: Revelations at 100!

In February 2004, with the other members of the Queue editorial board, I was at our monthly in-person dinner meeting, where we gather to come up with interesting discussion topics that will result in practitioner-oriented articles (and the best authors to write them) for publication in Queue. It was only our second year in business, and although we had published some successful and widely read articles, Queue still had no regular columnists. I was initially invited to board meetings by another editorial board member, Eric Allman, and had written a couple of articles for the publication. I was also co-authoring my first book but had never been a columnist. Although the concept seemed appealing at the time, perhaps due to too much wine with dinner, I was at a loss on how to actually make it work.