APPropriate Behaviour
The book about all the things software writers do that aren't writing software.
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Author Archives: Graham
I do the stupid so you don’t have to
So you want to use bc for some hexadecimal maths. You set the input base: ibase=16 and the output base: obase=16 Oops! I just set it to output in base 22. I’d already set it to think numbers were input … Continue reading
Posted in UNIX
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Meta-writing
Barely 4,000 years ago, documents were written on heavy, clay tablets. The Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the earliest known works of fiction, was written on 11 such tablets with a 12th added later. There was only one thing you … Continue reading
Posted in books, documentation, Talk
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Shell scripts and Xcode
Back in 2009 at the first NSConf, Scotty asked some of the speakers for an Xcode Quick Tip. I’m still using mine today. When your target needs a “Run Shell Script” build phase, don’t write the script into the box … Continue reading
Posted in code-level, tool-support
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APPropriate Behaviour is complete!
APPropriate Behaviour, the book on things programmers do that aren’t programming, is now complete! The final chapter – a philosophy of software making – has been added, concluding the book. Just because it’s complete, doesn’t mean it’s finished: as my … Continue reading
When single responsibility isn’t possible
This posted was motivated by Rob Rix’s bug report on NSObject, “Split NSObject protocol into logical sub-protocols”. He notes that NSObject provides multiple responsibilities[*]: hashing, equality checking, sending messages, introspecting and so on. What that bug report didn’t look at … Continue reading
Posted in Foundation, Java, ruby
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More security processes go wrong
I just signed a piece of card so that I could take a picture of it, clean it up and attach it to a document, pretending that I’d printed the document out, signed it, and scanned it back in. I … Continue reading
Posted in Authentication, Vulnerability
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Could effortless lecturers make everything seem too easy?
From the British Psychological Society blog: Engaging lecturers can breed overconfidence. The students who’d seen the smooth lecturer thought they would do much better than did the students who saw the awkward lecturer, consistent with the idea that a fluent … Continue reading
Posted in psychology, Talk
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Objective-C, dependencies, linking
In the most recent episode of Edge Cases, Wolf and Andrew discuss dependency management, specifically as it pertains to Objective-C applications that import libraries using the Cocoapods tool. In one app I worked on a few years ago, two different … Continue reading
Posted in code-level, tool-support
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When security procedures go bad
My password with my bank may as well be “I can’t remember, can we go through the security questions please?” That’s my answer so many times when they ask, and every time it gets me in via a slightly tedious … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
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Specifications for interchanging objects
One of the interesting aspects of Smalltalk and similar languages including Objective-C and Ruby is that while the object model exposes a hierarchy of classes, consumers of objects in these environments are free to ignore the position of the object … Continue reading
Posted in documentation, OOP, software-engineering, TDD, tool-support
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