APPropriate Behaviour
The book about all the things software writers do that aren't writing software.
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Author Archives: Graham
In which new developer tools are dull
Over on lobste.rs I said that I don’t hold out much hope for another “blue plane” style event in developer tools. In one of Alan Kay’s presentations, he referred to the ordinary way of things as the pink plane, and … Continue reading
Posted in software-engineering, tool-support
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Bottom-up teaching
We’re told that the core idea in computer programming is problem-solving. That one of the benefits of learning about computer programming (one that is not universally accepted) is gaining the skill of problem decomposition. If you look at real teaching … Continue reading
Posted in academia, architecture of sorts, edjercashun
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Why I don’t have a favourite programming language
This is my take on Ilya Sher’s similar post, though from a different context. He is mainly interested in systems programming, I have mostly written user apps and backend services, and also some developer tools. I originally thought that I … Continue reading
Posted in tool-support
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Free Software should welcome contributions by Apple, Google
It started with a toot from the FSF: Freedom means not #madebygoogle or #madebyapple, it means #madebythousandsoffreesoftwarehackers #GNU This post is an expansion on my reply: @fsf as an FSF Associate I’m happy to use software made by Google or … Continue reading
Posted in AAPL, freesoftware
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Recommend me some books or articles
I’ve been looking for something to read on these topics, can you help? a history of the Unix wars (the ‘workstation’ period involving Sun, HP, Apollo, DEC, IBM, NeXT and SGI primarily, but really everything starting from AT&T up to … Continue reading
Posted in books, learning
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On books
I’d say that if there’s one easy way to summarise how I work, it’s as an information focus. I’m not great at following a solution all the way to the bitter end so you should never let me be a … Continue reading
Posted in advancement of the self, books, edjercashun, learning
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Give me an S
S – I can find the thing I need to change. O – My change will either be an extension or a replacement. L – My replacement or extension needs to be a drop-in change. I – Here’s what my … Continue reading
Posted in code-level, OOP
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Security consultancy from the other side
I used to run an application security consultancy business, back before the kinds of businesses who knew they needed to consider application security had got past assessing creating mobile apps. Whoops! Something that occasionally, nay, often happened was that clients … Continue reading
Posted in Crypto, Encryption, Policy
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Choose boring employers
Amusingly, my previous post choose boring employees was shared to hacker news under the off-by-one erroneous title choose boring employers. That seemed funny enough to run with, but what does it mean to choose boring employers? One interpretation is that … Continue reading
Posted in architecture of sorts, Business
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Choose boring employees
An idea I’ve heard from many directions recently is that “we” (whoever they are) “need to be on the latest tech stack in order to attract developers”. And yes, you do attract developers that way. Developers who want to be … Continue reading
Posted in architecture of sorts, Business
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