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Chiron Codex: helping software engineers become centaurs. APPropriate Behaviour
The book about all the things software writers do that aren't writing software.
Author Archives: Graham
This is fine
The BBC micro:bit is a tool for introducing young people to programming. It’s a little embedded computer with a few inputs and a matrix of LEDs for output, as well as some control lines. In principle it’s quite easy to … Continue reading
Posted in edjercashun, Responsibility
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By the river
My home stands near to a bridge over the Avon, the same river that lends its name to Stratford-on-Avon. By walking to the end of my street then through the churchyard, I could stand over the river and watch it … Continue reading
Posted in whatevs
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Answer: none of them
A question programmers frequently ask when they’re considering career growth or personal learning is “which programming language should I learn next?” Why would learning another programming language help? If you only know one programming language and it is provided by … Continue reading
Posted in advancement of the self
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I fix things for a living
Previously, on SICPers, I wrote that I make mistakes for a living. But making mistakes is no good if nobody’s cleaning up after them, so I also fix things. Whatever gets in my team’s way, it’s my responsibility as their … Continue reading
Posted in Responsibility
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No, you can’t ignore politics
I wrote, a couple of years ago, about the fact that you can’t ignore ethics in software engineering. Your software is built for a reason, it’s used for a reason, you need to be aware of those reasons and whether … Continue reading
Posted in economics, Responsibility
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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
Posted in Responsibility
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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
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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
Posted in Business, economics
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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
Posted in Business
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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
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