APPropriate Behaviour
The book about all the things software writers do that aren't writing software.
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Monthly Archives: March 2022
Software design is refinement, not abstraction
James Koppel tells us that software engineers keep using the word “abstraction” and that he does not think it means what they think it means. I believe that he is correct, and that the confusion over the term abstraction comes … Continue reading
Unit test: you keep using this word.
There’s an idea doing the rounds that the “unit” in “unit test” means the unity of the test, rather than a test of a software unit. Moreover, that it originally meant this, and that anyone who says “unit test” to … Continue reading
Why are we like this?
The recent post on addressing “technical debt” did the rounds of the usual technology forums, where it raised a reasonable question: why are people basing these decisions on balancing engineering-led with customer-led tasks on opinion? Why don’t engineers take an … Continue reading
Posted in software-engineering
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When to “address” “technical debt”?
The phrase “technical debt” appears in scare quotes here because, as observed in The Unreasonable Ineffectiveness of Considering Things Harmful, technical debt has quite a specific meaning and I’m talking about something broader here. Quoting Ward Cunningham: Shipping first time … Continue reading
So that’s how it works
Back in Apple Silicon, Xeon Phi, and Amigas I asked how Apple would scale the memory up in a hypothetical Mac Pro based on the M1. We still don’t know because there still isn’t one, although now we sort of … Continue reading
Posted in AAPL, arm, Mac
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Having the right data
In the beginning there was the relational database, and it was…OK, I guess. It was based on the relational model, and allowed operations that were within the relational algebra. I mean it actually didn’t. The usual standard for relational databases … Continue reading
