APPropriate Behaviour
The book about all the things software writers do that aren't writing software.
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Author Archives: Graham
Related methods and tools
The book Software: A Technical History has plenty of exercises and projects at the end of each chapter, to get readers thinking about software and its history and to motivate additional research. For example, here’s exercise 1 (of 27 exercises … Continue reading
YX problem
Software people are always all up in the XY problem: someone asks about how to do X when what they’re really trying to solve is Y. I find the YX problem much more frustrating: where software people decide that they … Continue reading
Posted in learning
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Floating point numbers aren’t weird
When people say “floating point numbers are weird”, they typically mean that the IEEE 754 floating point representation for numbers doesn’t meet their needs, or maybe that it meets their needs but it is surprising in its behaviour because it … Continue reading
Posted in software-engineering
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Still no silver bullet?
In his 1986 article No Silver Bullet—Essence and Accident in Software Engineering, Fred Brooks suggests that there’ll never be a single tool, technique, or fad that realises an order-of-magnitude improvement in software engineering productivity. His reason is simple: if there … Continue reading
Posted in design, software-engineering
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On whiteboard coding
Another day in which someone lamented to me the demeaning nature of the interview coding challenge. It is indeed embarrassing, when someone with more than two decades of software engineering experience is asked to complete a gotcha-style programming task under … Continue reading
Posted in whatevs
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On software engineering hermeneutics
When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less. Humpty-Dumpty in Alice through the Looking Glass In my recent round of TDD clarifications, one surprising experience is that folks out … Continue reading
On rational myths
In my research field, one characteristic of institutions is their “rational myths”; ideas that people tell each other are true, and believe are true, but which are under-explored, unverified, and under-challenged. Belief in these myths leads to supposedly rational actions … Continue reading
Posted in academia, social-science, software-engineering
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We shall return one day
On this day 80 years ago, 16th November 1943, the villagers of Tyneham near Lulworth was evacuated to allow Allied military forces to prepare for D-Day. Despite promises that the evacuation was temporary, the UK lurched directly from the second … Continue reading
In which things are given names
I recently joined in a very interesting discussion with some of my peers on the thorny subject of naming variables in programs. The core question was whether it’s OK to give a variable a temporary name while you’re still working … Continue reading
Posted in code-level
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I’ve vastly misunderstood the Single Responsibility Principle
So have a lot of other people; my understanding of it accords with much writing I’ve seen about the principle on the web, and elsewhere. For example, in Michael Feathers’ “Working Effectively with Legacy Code”: Every class should have a … Continue reading
