Butler Lampson worked on several ground breaking computing projects at Xerox's PARC laboratories – the laser printer, Ethernet, and WYSIWYG editors among other things. At PARC he wrote a paper: Hints for Computer System Design, with loads of practical tips on system design. Many of them continue to be applicable even now; although maybe Lampson's concerns about performance aren't as relevant – most developers today don't need to think about the speed of their software as much as they did back then.