Monthly Archives: November 2016

I make mistakes for a living

As a team lead, my job is to make all the mistakes on my team. I’m responsible for each one of them. I’m also responsible for deciding what we do about them, whether that’s to ensure that they can’t happen … Continue reading

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Learning about software freedom

On the front page of Hacker News at the moment is a post on The Three Software Freedoms. It does away with the Free Software Foundation’s Freedom Zero: The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose. … Continue reading

Posted in freesoftware, Responsibility | 2 Comments

On the rhetorical cost of ownership

I’ve recently been talking about software engineering economics, in a very loose way, but so have other people. And now I understand that it’s annoying when people talk about it, and have decided to continue anyway. I’ve decided to continue … Continue reading

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Can’t you just…

Continuing the thoughts on vexing problems, one difficulty when it comes to discussing software is talking about the size of software. I’m not really talking about productivity metrics – good or bad – like source lines of code or function … Continue reading

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On the business case for (or against) software

In the vexing problems, I dismissed the hard problems of computer science as being incidental to another problem: we can’t say what the value of our work is. That post contained plenty of questions, precisely because the subject is so … Continue reading

Posted in Business, economics | 2 Comments

The Vexing Problems in Programming

I admit it, I’ve been on the internet for quite a while (I could tell you that my ICQ number is 95941970, but I haven’t logged in for years) and my habits haven’t changed. I still regularly get technology news … Continue reading

Posted in Business, economics, Responsibility | 2 Comments