APPropriate Behaviour
The book about all the things software writers do that aren't writing software.
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Category Archives: software-engineering
Sound bites considered harmful
Knuth said: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Only, what he actually said was: There is no doubt that the grail of efficiency leads to abuse. Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the … Continue reading
Posted in software-engineering
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Coding. Standards.
I just realised that this month marks the 10th anniversary of my first payment for writing software (on, of all the weird things to be writing software on in 2002, a NeXTstation)! What have I learned from those ten years? … Continue reading
Posted in advancement of the self, Business, code-level, OOP, software-engineering
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Class clusters, placeholder objects, value-oriented programming, and all that good stuff.
Have you ever seen this exception in your crash log? 2012-05-29 17:55:37.240 Untitled 2[5084:707] *** Terminating app due to uncaught exception ‘NSInvalidArgumentException’, reason: ‘*** -length only defined for abstract class. Define -[NSPlaceholderString length]!’ What’s that NSPlaceholderString class? Leaving aside NSMutableString … Continue reading
Posted in code-level, Foundation, software-engineering
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Is privacy a security feature?
I’ve spoken a lot about privacy recently: mainly because it’s an important problem. Important enough to hit the headlines; important enough for trade associations and independent developers alike to make a priority. Whether it’s talks at conferences, or guiding people … Continue reading
Posted in Privacy, software-engineering
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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On my newer competence
This time last year, I evaluated myself against the programmer competency matrix. So where am I one turn around the daystar later? I have to admit that this was mainly because I was jet lagged in a hotel room in … Continue reading
Posted in Business, software-engineering
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