Category Archives: whatevs

The upcoming issue of the SICPers newsletter is all about phrases that were introduced to computing to mean one thing, but seem to get used in practice to mean another. This annoys purists, pedants, and historians: it also annoys the … Continue reading →

Recently Dan North asked the origin of the software design aphorism “make it work, make it right, make it fast”. Before delving into that story, it’s important to note that I had already heard this phrase. I don’t know where, … Continue reading →

My Python script for Global.health was not running in production, because it couldn’t find some imports. Now the real solution is to package up the imports with setuptools and install them at runtime (we manage the environments with poetry), but … Continue reading →

Back in 1999, the OOPSLA conference held a show trial for the “Gang of Four”: Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and John Vlissides. Five years earlier, they had released their book “Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software” at … Continue reading →

When I wrote I have some small idea of what I’m doing, it was on the basis that DHH was engaging in some exaggeration. Surely software engineers, whose job depends on what they know and what they can learn, would … Continue reading →

I’ve had a number of conversations about what “we” in the “free software community” “need” to do to combat the growth in proprietary, user-hostile and customer-hostile business models like cloud user-generated content hosts, social media platforms, hosted payment platforms, videoconferencing … Continue reading →

A bunch of the topics I wanted to discuss all turned out to have a common basis, so I’m going to write the post about the commonality using a couple of examples from the specific topics for illumination. Maybe I’ll … Continue reading →

Another day, another developer explaining that they don’t follow some popular practice. And their reason? Nothing more than because other people do the thing. “Best practices don’t exist,” they airily intone. “They’re really mediocre practices”. In one sense, they’re correct. … Continue reading →