APPropriate Behaviour
The book about all the things software writers do that aren't writing software.
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Author Archives: Graham
Dogma-driven development
You can find plenty of dogmatic positions in software development, in blogs, in podcasts, in books, and even in academic articles. “You should (always/never) write tests before writing code.” “Pair programming is a (good/bad) use of time.” “(X/not X) considered … Continue reading
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The whole ‘rockstar developer’ thing is backwards
Another day, another clearout of junk from people who want ‘rockstar iPhone developers’ for their Shoreditch startups. I could just say “no”, or I could launch into a detailed discussion of the problems in this picture. Rockstars are stagnant No-one, … Continue reading
Posted in advancement of the self, social-science
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Programmer Values
A question and answer exchange over at programmers.stackexchange.com reveals something interesting about how software is valued. The question asked whether there is any real-world data regarding costs and benefits of test-driven development.[*] One of the answers contained, at time of … Continue reading
Posted in social-science, TDD
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Know what counts
In Make it Count, Harry Roberts describes blacking out on stage at the end of a busy and sleepless week. Ironically, he was at the start of a talk in which he was to discuss being selective over side projects, … Continue reading
The future will be just like the past, right?
I’ve been having a bit of a retro programming session: The computer in the photo is a Cambridge Z88, and it won’t surprise you to know that I’ve owned it for years. However, it’s far from my first computer. I … Continue reading
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On what makes a “good” comment
I have previously discussed the readability of code: The author must decide who will read the code, and how to convey the important information to those readers. The reader must analyse the code in terms of how it satisfies this … Continue reading
Posted in documentation
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Did that restructuring work actually help?
Before getting into the meat of this post, I’d like to get into the meta of this post. This essay, and I imagine many in this blog [Ed: by which I meant the blog this has been imported from], will … Continue reading
Posted in academia
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Teaching Programming to People. It’s easy, right?
I was doing a literature search for a different subject (which will appear soon), and found a couple of articles related to teaching programming. I don’t know if you remember when you learnt programming, but you probably found it hard. … Continue reading
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Elegant Object-oriented Software Design via Interactive, Evolutionary Computation
The abstract of this paper from the ArXiv had me concerned: Design is fundamental to software development but can be demanding to perform. Thus to assist the software designer, evolutionary computing is being increasingly applied using machine-based, quantitative fitness functions … Continue reading
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On Scientific Computing
Or: Not everyone works the way you work Currently doing the rounds on Twitter is a paper from the ArXiV called Best Practices for Scientific Computing—a paper with 13 authors and 6 pages,including a page-long collection of references. Here’s the … Continue reading
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