Category Archives: software-engineering

I published a new book!

Posted on 2012-12-04 by Graham

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 →

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Surprising ARC performance characteristics

Posted on 2012-11-28 by Graham

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 →

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Object-Oriented callback design

Posted on 2012-11-17 by Graham

One of the early promises of object-oriented programming, encapsulated in the design of the Smalltalk APIs, was a reduction – or really an encapsulation – of the complexity of code. Many programmers believe that the more complex a method or … Continue reading →

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An apology to readers of Test-Driven iOS Development

Posted on 2012-09-03 by Graham

I made a mistake. Not a typo or a bug in some pasted code (actually I’ve made some of those, too). I perpetuated what seems (now, since I analyse it) to be a big myth in software engineering. I uncritically … Continue reading →

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Does that thing you like doing actually work?

Posted on 2012-08-29 by Graham

Genuine question. I’ve written before about Test-Driven Development, and I’m sure some of you practice it: can you show evidence that it’s better than (or, for that matter, evidence that it’s worse than) some other practice? Statistically significant evidence? How … Continue reading →

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What’s a software architect?

Posted on 2012-07-29 by Graham

After a discussion on the twitters with Kellabyte and Iris Classon about software architects, I thought I’d summarise my position. Feel welcome to disagree. What does a software architect do? A software architect is there to identify risks that affect … Continue reading →

Posted in Responsibility, software-engineering | 2 Comments

Inheritance is old and busted

Posted on 2012-07-25 by Graham

Back when I started reading about Object-Oriented Programming (which was when Java was new, I was using Delphi and maybe the ArcGIS scripting language, which also had OO features) the entire hotness was inheritance. Class hierarchies as complicated as biological … Continue reading →

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On Null Objects

Posted on 2012-07-21 by Graham

I’ve said before, NSNull is an anti-pattern. It’s nice that we have the nil object, which allows us to have a stand-in for any object that doesn’t do anything. Unfortunately, it’s not a universal stand-in. You can’t add nil to … Continue reading →

Posted in code-level, OOP, software-engineering | 3 Comments

Illuminative-C

Posted on 2012-07-16 by Graham

In addition to being a mildly accomplished software engineer, I’ve done some studying and armchair research in the field of ancient languages and palaeography. What happens if we smoosh those fields together? In a very slight way, art historian and … Continue reading →

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On community

Posted on 2012-07-14 by Graham

This is a post that had been boiling for a while; I talked a little about the topic when I was in Appsterdam earlier this year, and had a few more thoughts which were completely supplanted and rearranged by watching

Posted in AAPL, advancement of the self, books, Business, iDeveloper.TV, iPhone, Mac, NSConf, OOP, Responsibility, software-engineering, Talk, WebObjects | Comments Off on On community