After a discussion on the twitters with Kellabyte and Iris Classon about software architects, I thought I’d summarise my position. Feel welcome to disagree. What does a software architect do? A software architect is there to identify risks that affect the technical implementation of the software product, and address those risks. Preferably before they stop […]
This post is sort-of a follow-on to @daveaddey’s post on the average app; although in reality it’s a follow-on to the response that comes out every time a post on app store revenue is written. Events go like this: Some statistic about app store revenue. “Your numbers include free apps. You shouldn’t include free apps. […]
Back when I started reading about Object-Oriented Programming (which was when Java was new, I was using Delphi and maybe the ArcGIS scripting language, which also had OO features) the entire hotness was inheritance. Class hierarchies as complicated as biological taxonomies were diagrammed, implemented and justified. Authors explained that while both a Dog and a […]
I’ve said before, NSNull is an anti-pattern. It’s nice that we have the nil object, which allows us to have a stand-in for any object that doesn’t do anything. Unfortunately, it’s not a universal stand-in. You can’t add nil to a collection. You can add +[NSNull null] to a collection, but you can’t use that […]
In addition to being a mildly accomplished software engineer, I’ve done some studying and armchair research in the field of ancient languages and palaeography. What happens if we smoosh those fields together? In a very slight way, art historian and fellow Oxenafordisc Dr. Janina Ramirez did that in her series on Illuminations: the Private Lives […]
This is a post that had been boiling for a while; I talked a little about the topic when I was in Appsterdam earlier this year, and had a few more thoughts which were completely supplanted and rearranged by watching
I previously described a system for storing and checking credentials on Mac OS and iOS based on using many rounds of a hashing function to generate a key from the password. Time has moved on, and Apple has extended the CommonCrypto library to provide a simple, standard and supported way of doing this. If this […]
Knuth said: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Only, what he actually said was: There is no doubt that the grail of efficiency leads to abuse. Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a […]
Don’t you hate those times when you go to a talk or article that says “you should be doing this”, but then doesn’t explain how to do that? I just wrote one. In “Coding. Standards.” I explained that what software engineers should do is to learn and analyse from all their experiences and interactions. But […]
I just realised that this month marks the 10th anniversary of my first payment for writing software (on, of all the weird things to be writing software on in 2002, a NeXTstation)! What have I learned from those ten years? What advice would I give to someone who wants to do this stuff for at […]
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The book about all the things software writers do that aren't writing software.
