APPropriate Behaviour
The book about all the things software writers do that aren't writing software.
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Monthly Archives: February 2022
Aphorism Considered Harmful
Recently Dan North asked the origin of the software design aphorism “make it work, make it right, make it fast”. Before delving into that story, it’s important to note that I had already heard this phrase. I don’t know where, … Continue reading
What is software engineering?
I suppose if I’m going to have a tagline like “from programming to software engineering”, we ought to have some kind of shared understanding of what that journey entails. It would be particularly useful to agree on the destination. The … Continue reading
Diagnosing a Docker image build problem
My Python script for Global.health was not running in production, because it couldn’t find some imports. Now the real solution is to package up the imports with setuptools and install them at runtime (we manage the environments with poetry), but … Continue reading
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Halloween is Over
Back in 2016, I sent the following letter to Linux Voice, and it was published in issue 24 as the star letter. LV came to an end (and made all of their content available as Creative Commons) when they merged … Continue reading
Design Patterns On Trial
Back in 1999, the OOPSLA conference held a show trial for the “Gang of Four”: Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and John Vlissides. Five years earlier, they had released their book “Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software” at … Continue reading
