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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
Detecting overflows, undefined behaviour and other nasties
You will remember that a previous post discussed what happens when you add one to an integer, and that the answer isn’t always obvious. Indeed, the answer isn’t always defined. As it happens, there are plenty of weird cases that … Continue reading
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An open letter to Xcode
The post below has been filed verbatim as an Apple Developer Tools bug report with ID 13051064. Dear Xcode, imagine that you had a combine harvester. Only, this combine harvester, instead of having a hopper into which the winnowed wheat … Continue reading
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Retiring the “Apple developers are insular” meme
There’s an old trope used in discussions of Mac and iOS developers, that says they’re too inward-looking. They only think about software in ways that have been “blessed” by Apple, their platform vendor. I’m pretty sure that I’ve used this … Continue reading
Posted in advancement of the self, code-level, Responsibility, software-engineering
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What happens when you add one to an integer?
It depends. You saw in the previous post that there are plenty of different integer types, some with known sizes and some where the size is set by the implementation. Well for each size of integer type there are two … Continue reading
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How big is an integer?
In the beginning, when all was without form and void, Kernighan and Ritchie created char. And they said, “let it be of a size chosen by the compiler, guaranteed to be large enough to hold one character from the execution … Continue reading
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Server-side Objective-C
Recently, Kevin Lawler posted an “Informal Technical Note” saying that Apple could clean up on licence sales if only they’d support web backend development. There are only two problems with this argument: it’s flawed, and the precondition probably won’t be … Continue reading
Posted in code-level, OOP, server, software-engineering, WebObjects
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Can code be “readable”?
Did Isaac Asimov write good stories? Different people will answer that question in different ways. People who don’t read English and don’t have access to a translation will probably be unable to answer. People who don’t like science fiction on … Continue reading
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I published a new book!
Executive summary: it’s called APPropriate Behaviour, head over to the LeanPub site to check it out. For quite a while, I’ve noticed that posts here are moving away from nuts and bolts code towards questions about evaluating my own performance, … Continue reading
Posted in advancement of the self, books, Business, code-level, Responsibility, software-engineering
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Surprising ARC performance characteristics
The project I’m working on at the moment has quite tight performance constraints. It needs to start up quickly, do its work at a particular rate and, being an iOS app, there’s a hard limit on how much RAM can … Continue reading
Posted in code-level, performance, software-engineering
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Sideloading content into iOS apps
All non-trivial apps visualise content in some form, whether it’s game levels embedded in the app, data loaded from some internet service, or something else. In many cases the developer who’s writing the Objective-C code isn’t going to be the … Continue reading
Posted in iPad, iPhone, tool-support
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