Author Archives: Graham

About Graham

I make it faster and easier for you to create high-quality code.

So you’re off to WWDC

Jeff has updated his excellent WWDC first-timer’s guide, and I thought I’d augment that with some things I’ve noticed. The easiest and cheapest way to get from SFO to San Francisco is via BART. Once you get to the arrivals … Continue reading

Posted in WWDC | Comments Off on So you’re off to WWDC

Metacognition-driven development

To find out what techniques work for you in a field of practice, you often need to think about how you think. To decide what it is that drives your learning processes, and then adapt your practices to suit that. … Continue reading

Posted in advancement of the self, software-engineering, TDD | Comments Off on Metacognition-driven development

Messing about with Clang

I’ve been reading the Smalltalk-80 blue book (pdf) recently, and started to wonder what a Smalltalk style object browser for Objective-C would look like. Not just from the perspective of presenting the information that makes up Objective-C classes in novel … Continue reading

Posted in code-level, Mac, software-engineering, tool-support | 5 Comments

Classes are globals, too

Software engineers are used to the notion that global variables are a bad idea. Globals are usually accessed by asking, not by telling. They introduce tight coupling between any module that uses the global and the one that declares it, … Continue reading

Posted in code-level, software-engineering, TDD | Comments Off on Classes are globals, too

Software-ICs and a component marketplace

In the previous post, I was talking about Object-Oriented Programming, an Evolutionary Approach. What follows is a thought experiment based on that. Chapter 6 of Brad Cox’s book, once he’s finished explaining how ObjC works (and who to buy it … Continue reading

Posted in Business, code-level, OOP | Comments Off on Software-ICs and a component marketplace

Comparing Objective-C and Objective-C with Objective-C

A while back, I wrote an object-oriented dispatch system for Objective-C. It defines only three things: an object type (the BlockObject), a way to create new objects (the BlockConstructor), and a way to message objects (the dispatch mechanism). That’s all … Continue reading

Posted in code-level, OOP, software-engineering | Comments Off on Comparing Objective-C and Objective-C with Objective-C

The debugger of royalty

We’ve all got little libraries of code or scripts that help us with debugging. Often these are for logging information in a particular way, or wrapping logs/tests such that they’re only invoked in Debug builds but not in production. Or … Continue reading

Posted in code-level, iPad, iPhone, Mac, TDiOSD | 11 Comments

TDD and crypto in one place

Well, I suppose if I’ve written two books, it’s about time I wrote a contorted blog post that references both of the worlds. I recently wrote an encryption module for an app, and thought it’d be useful to share something … Continue reading

Posted in code-level, Crypto, TDD | Comments Off on TDD and crypto in one place

Culture, heritage and apps

I said earlier on Twitter that I’m disappointed with the state of apps produced for museums and libraries. I’d better explain what I mean. Here’s what I said: Disappointed to find that many museum apps (British Library, Bodleian, Concorde etc) … Continue reading

Posted in Business | 2 Comments

Test-Driven iOS Development

Here it is, after more than a year in the making, the book that they really did want you to read! Test-driven IOS Development (Developer’s Library) (affiliate link) has finally hit the stores[*]. I wrote this book for the simple … Continue reading

Posted in books, PCAS, software-engineering, TDD, TDiOSD | 6 Comments