APPropriate Behaviour
The book about all the things software writers do that aren't writing software.
FSF
Author Archives: Graham
Security consultancy from the other side
I used to run an application security consultancy business, back before the kinds of businesses who knew they needed to consider application security had got past assessing creating mobile apps. Whoops! Something that occasionally, nay, often happened was that clients … Continue reading
Posted in Crypto, Encryption, Policy
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Choose boring employers
Amusingly, my previous post choose boring employees was shared to hacker news under the off-by-one erroneous title choose boring employers. That seemed funny enough to run with, but what does it mean to choose boring employers? One interpretation is that … Continue reading
Posted in architecture of sorts, Business
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Choose boring employees
An idea I’ve heard from many directions recently is that “we” (whoever they are) “need to be on the latest tech stack in order to attract developers”. And yes, you do attract developers that way. Developers who want to be … Continue reading
Posted in architecture of sorts, Business
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In which GNUstep confuses and ultimately disappoints
I’m not the most hardcore of GNUstep people, but I’m certainly somewhat invested. I’ve been building apps, lurking in lists, and contributing code on and off for around 13 years, including a job working with a few of the maintainers. … Continue reading
Posted in architecture of sorts, gnustep, qt
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On the “advances” in web development since 1995
The first “web application” I worked on was written in a late version of WebObjects, version 4.5. An HTTP request was handled by an “adaptor” layer that chose a controller based on the parameters of the request, you could call … Continue reading
Posted in futurology, WebObjects
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When Object-Oriented Programming Isn’t
A problem I was investigating today led me to a two-line Ruby method much like this: class App # … def write_file_if_configured file_writer = FileWriter.new(@configuration.options) file_writer.write if file_writer.can_write? end end This method definitely looks nice and object-oriented, and satisfies many … Continue reading
Two ways of thinking
I’ve used this idea in conversations for years, and can’t find a post on it, which I find surprising but there you go. There are, broadly speaking, two different ways to look at programming languages. And I think that these … Continue reading
Posted in code-level, social-science
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If Object-Oriented Programming were announced today
Here’s an idea: the current backlash against OOP is actually because people aren’t doing OOP, they’re doing whatever they were doing before OOP. But they’re calling it OOP, because the people who were promoting OOP wanted them to believe that … Continue reading
Posted in FP, OOP
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Open Source: because I got mine, so fuck you
The Free Software movement has at its core the idea that people have the freedom to use, study, share, and improve the software on their computers. The modern developer “ecosystem” has co-opted this to create a two-tier society: a developer … Continue reading
Posted in freesoftware
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Technical debt and jury service
We have the idea that in addition to the product development backlogs for our teams, there’s an engineering backlog where technical debt paydown, process/tooling improvements, and other sitewide engineering concerns get recorded. Working on them is done in time that … Continue reading
Posted in software-engineering
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