APPropriate Behaviour
The book about all the things software writers do that aren't writing software.
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Author Archives: Graham
More speed, lower velocity
I frequently meet software teams who describe themselves as “high velocity”, they even have graphs coming from Jira to prove it, and yet their ability to ship great software, to delight their customers, or even to attract their customers, doesn’t … Continue reading
Posted in Business, performance, process, software-engineering
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Figurative Programming and Gloom: the [G]raphical [LOOM]
Donald Knuth is pretty cool. One of the books he wrote that I own and have actually read[*] is Literate Programming, in which he describes (among other things) weaving program text and documentation together in a single narrative. Two of … Continue reading
Posted in tool-support
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Two books
A member of a mailing list I’m on recently asked: what two books should be on every engineer’s bookshelf? Here’s my answer. Many software engineers, the ones described toward the end of Code Complete 2, would benefit most from Donald … Continue reading
Packaging software
I’ve been learning about Debian Packaging. I’ve built OS X packages, RPMs, Dockerfiles, JARs, and others, but never dpkgs, so I thought I’d give it a go. My goal is to make a suite of GNUstep packages for Debian. There … Continue reading
Concurrent objects and SCOOP
Representing concurrency in an object-oriented system has been a long-standing problem. Encapsulating the concurrency primitives via objects and methods is easy enough, but doesn’t get us anywhere. We still end up composing our programs out of threads and mutexes and … Continue reading
A little challenge
A little challenge today: create a JS function that turns its arguments into a list of pairs. Actually, the brief was “using Ramda” but I ended up not doing that: function basePairwise(xs) { if (xs.length == 0) return []; if … Continue reading
Posted in FP, javascript
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Ultimate Programmer Super Stack: Last day!
I already wrote about the Ultimate Programmer Super Stack, a huge bundle of books and courses on a range of technologies: Python, JS, Ruby, Java, HTML, node, Aurelia… and APPropriate Behaviour, my book on everything that goes into being a … Continue reading
Posted in advancement of the self, books, edjercashun
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Coming to terms with fewer terms
I was on a “Leadership in Architecture” panel organised by RP International recently, and was asked about problems we face using new techniques like Microservices, serverless and machine learning in the financial technology sector. The biggest blocker I see is … Continue reading
Posted in software-engineering
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Microservices for the Desktop
In OOP the Easy Way, I make the argument that microservices are a rare instance of OOP done well: Microservice adopters are able to implement different services in different technologies, to think about changes to a given service only in … Continue reading
Ultimate Programmer Super Stack
There’s a great bundle of polyglot learning taking place over at the Ultimate Programmer Super Stack. My book, APPropriate Behaviour – the things every programmer needs to know that aren’t programming – is featured alongside content on Python, Ruby, Java, … Continue reading
Posted in advancement of the self, books
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