APPropriate Behaviour
The book about all the things software writers do that aren't writing software.
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Author Archives: Graham
You say “cave dweller debugging”, I say debug logging
There are still many situations where it’s not feasible to stop a process, attach the debugger, and start futzing with memory. We can argue over whether this is because the industry didn’t learn enough from the Pharo folks later. For … Continue reading
Posted in code-level
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The Requirements Trifecta
It’s hard to argue that any one approach to, well, anything in software is better or worse than any others, because very few people are collecting any data and even fewer are reporting what they’re trying. Worst is understanding how … Continue reading
Posted in software-engineering
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On or Between
The new way to model concurrency is with coroutines (1963), i.e. the async/await dance or (building upon) call-with-concurrent-continuation. The new new way is with actors (1973), and the old and busted ways are with threads (1966), and promises (1976). As … Continue reading
WWDC 2022 is a WWDC watch party
Apple have shared initial timings for this year’s WorldWide Developer Conference. In typical in-person years this would be the trigger for various “WWDC attendee tips” posts (don’t forget to drink water! Remember to sleep sometime through the week! Don’t go … Continue reading
Posted in AAPL, WWDC
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Classism in software engineering
I just heard someone using the phrase “first-class citizen” in a programming podcast, and that led me to ponder the use of that phrase. The podcast was Swift Package Manager SuperPowers from Empower Apps. Empower’s a great podcast, this is … Continue reading
Posted in tool-support
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Software design is refinement, not abstraction
James Koppel tells us that software engineers keep using the word “abstraction” and that he does not think it means what they think it means. I believe that he is correct, and that the confusion over the term abstraction comes … Continue reading
Unit test: you keep using this word.
There’s an idea doing the rounds that the “unit” in “unit test” means the unity of the test, rather than a test of a software unit. Moreover, that it originally meant this, and that anyone who says “unit test” to … Continue reading
Why are we like this?
The recent post on addressing “technical debt” did the rounds of the usual technology forums, where it raised a reasonable question: why are people basing these decisions on balancing engineering-led with customer-led tasks on opinion? Why don’t engineers take an … Continue reading
Posted in software-engineering
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When to “address” “technical debt”?
The phrase “technical debt” appears in scare quotes here because, as observed in The Unreasonable Ineffectiveness of Considering Things Harmful, technical debt has quite a specific meaning and I’m talking about something broader here. Quoting Ward Cunningham: Shipping first time … Continue reading
So that’s how it works
Back in Apple Silicon, Xeon Phi, and Amigas I asked how Apple would scale the memory up in a hypothetical Mac Pro based on the M1. We still don’t know because there still isn’t one, although now we sort of … Continue reading
Posted in AAPL, arm, Mac
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