APPropriate Behaviour
The book about all the things software writers do that aren't writing software.
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Author Archives: Graham
The worst phrase in software marketing
“Rewritten from the ground up”. Please. Your old version mostly worked, except for those few corner cases that I’d learned how to work around. Now I don’t know whether the stuff that did work does work now, and I don’t … Continue reading
Posted in Business
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Culture Smell
A phrase I used in a discussion today. Developers are familiar with “code smells”, aspects of a codebase that aren’t necessarily wrong but do make you take a deeper look. By analogy, a culture smell surprising, but not necessarily wrong, … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
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Literate Programming with LibreOffice
This post comes in the form of an OpenDocumentFormat document containing a program that can extract programs from ODF documents, including the program contained in this document.
Posted in code-level, software-engineering, tool-support
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Prototypical object-oriented programming
Some people think that the notion of classes is intrinsic to object-oriented programming. Bertrand Meyer even wrote a textbook about OOP called A Touch of Class. But back in the 1980s, Alan Borning and others were trying to teach object-oriented … Continue reading
Posted in javascript, OOP
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In defence of assertions
The year is 2017 and people are still recommending processing out assertions from release builds. many assertions are short tests (whether or not that’s a good thing): this variable now has a value, this number is now greater than zero), … Continue reading
Posted in code-level
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In defence of large teams
Seen on the twitters: 1) Bad reasons why tech startups have incredibly large mobile teams even though from an engineering perspective they don’t need it. This is the No True Scotsman fallacy, as no true software department needs more than, … Continue reading
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Your build needs to be better
I’ve said it before, build systems are a huge annoyance. If your build is anything other than seemingly instantaneous, it’s costing you severe money. Your developers are probably off reading HN, or writing blog posts about how slow builds cost … Continue reading
Posted in architecture of sorts, code-level, tool-support
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I just want to point out that even the best of us aren’t doing what we expect the makers of acne creams to do. What we actually know about software development, and why we believe it’s true by Greg Wilson.
Why your app is not massively parallel software
That trash can Mac Pro that hasn’t been updated in years? It’s too hard to write software for. Now, let’s be clear, there are any number of abstractions that have been created to help programmers parallelise their thing, from the … Continue reading
Posted in whatevs
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Working Effectively with Legacy Code
I gave a talk to my team at ARM today on Working Effectively with Legacy Code by Michael Feathers. Here are some notes I made in preparation, which are somewhat related to the talk I gave. This may be the … Continue reading
Posted in advancement of the self, books, code-level, learning, software-engineering, TDD
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