Monthly Archives: January 2022

Falsehoods These Programmers Believed About Countries

Well this was a hard-fought issue. Setting the scene: since April 2020 I’ve been working on Global.health: a Data Science Initiative, where we collate information about Covid-19 cases worldwide and make them available in a standard schema for analysis. In … Continue reading

Posted in design, FLOSS, UI | 1 Comment

Introducing the SICPers Newsletter

I write a lot about software engineering. I talk a lot about software engineering. And I read a lot about software engineering. And that stuff is scattered all over the interwebs. Well, some of it isn’t even there, it’s in … Continue reading

Posted in writing | Leave a comment

[objc retain]; continues apace

I just finished recording episode 35 of [objc retain]; the stream on Objective-C programming with Free Software that I co-host with Steven Baker. It is available on Twitch and you can subscribe there to get notified about new episodes. It … Continue reading

Posted in FLOSS, freesoftware, gnustep, objc | Leave a comment

On Apple’s swings and misses

There’s a trope in the Apple-using technologist world that when an Apple innovation doesn’t immediately succeed, they abandon it. It’s not entirely true, let’s see what actually happens. The quote in the above-linked item that supports the claim: “Apple has … Continue reading

Posted in AAPL, UI | 2 Comments

Licenses aren’t sufficient

Another recent issue in the world of “centralised open source dependency repositories were a bad idea” initiated by the central contradiction of free software. People want to both give everything away without limitation on who uses it or how, and … Continue reading

Posted in FLOSS | Leave a comment

On the glorification of ignorance

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

Posted in whatevs | Leave a comment