APPropriate Behaviour
The book about all the things software writers do that aren't writing software.
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Monthly Archives: October 2014
Reversing the polarity of the message flow
On receiving a message with a parameter, sometimes an object just reverses the sense of what just happened and sends another message to the parameter object with itself as the parameter of this message. That’s a pretty hard sentence to … Continue reading
Posted in OOP
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The Humpty-Dumpty Guide to OOP
Everybody knows that the best way to sound intellectual and demonstrate the superiority of your approach to that thing you do is to wrap it in a fancy-schmancy noun term. This works particularly well with a term that can be … Continue reading
Posted in OOP
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Fuck. This. Shit.
Enough with the subtle allusions of the previous posts. What’s going on here is not right. It’s not right that I get to pass as a member of the group of people who can work in technology, while others have … Continue reading
Posted in advancement of the self, learning, Responsibility
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More on Layers
I was told yesterday that entity-relationship diagrams can be OK as high level descriptions of database schemata, but are not appropriate for designing a database. Enough information is missing that they are not able to model the problem. Could the … Continue reading
Posted in architecture of sorts
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The trouble with layers
In describing Inside-Out Apps I expressed my distrust of the “everything is MVC” school of design. […]when you get overly attached to MVC, then you look at every class you create and ask the question “is this a model, a … Continue reading
Posted in architecture of sorts
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Yes, you may delete tests
A frequently-presented objection to the concept of writing automated tests is that it ossifies the implementation of the system under test. “If I’ve got all the tests you’re proposing,” I hear, “then I won’t be able to make any changes … Continue reading
Posted in TDD
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The laser physics of software
I’ve worked in a few different places where there have been high-powered lasers, the sort that would make short work of slicing through Sean Connery in a Bond movie. With high-powered lasers comes mandatory laser safety training. At least, it … Continue reading
Posted in whatevs
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Full-stack
That moment where you’re looking back through your notes to see that you’ve: modelled charge carrier behaviour in semiconductors built a processor from discrete logic components patched kernels patched operating system tools written filesystems written device drivers contributed to a … Continue reading
Posted in whatevs
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More Excel-lent Adventures
I previously wrote about Excel as the most successful IDE: Now what makes a spreadsheet better as a development environment is difficult to say; I’m unaware of anyone having researched it. That research is indeed extant, and the story is … Continue reading
Posted in code-level, tool-support
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What it takes to “win” a discussion
You may have been to some kind of debate club at school, or at least had a debate in a class. If so, the debate you had was probably a competitive debate, and went something along these lines (causality is … Continue reading
Posted in learning
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