APPropriate Behaviour
The book about all the things software writers do that aren't writing software.
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Author Archives: Graham
I make mistakes for a living
As a team lead, my job is to make all the mistakes on my team. I’m responsible for each one of them. I’m also responsible for deciding what we do about them, whether that’s to ensure that they can’t happen … Continue reading
Posted in Responsibility
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Learning about software freedom
On the front page of Hacker News at the moment is a post on The Three Software Freedoms. It does away with the Free Software Foundation’s Freedom Zero: The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose. … Continue reading
Posted in freesoftware, Responsibility
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On the rhetorical cost of ownership
I’ve recently been talking about software engineering economics, in a very loose way, but so have other people. And now I understand that it’s annoying when people talk about it, and have decided to continue anyway. I’ve decided to continue … Continue reading
Posted in Business, economics
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Can’t you just…
Continuing the thoughts on vexing problems, one difficulty when it comes to discussing software is talking about the size of software. I’m not really talking about productivity metrics – good or bad – like source lines of code or function … Continue reading
Posted in Business
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On the business case for (or against) software
In the vexing problems, I dismissed the hard problems of computer science as being incidental to another problem: we can’t say what the value of our work is. That post contained plenty of questions, precisely because the subject is so … Continue reading
Posted in Business, economics
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The Vexing Problems in Programming
I admit it, I’ve been on the internet for quite a while (I could tell you that my ICQ number is 95941970, but I haven’t logged in for years) and my habits haven’t changed. I still regularly get technology news … Continue reading
Posted in Business, economics, Responsibility
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Withholding the Four Freedoms
Having downsized my rather over-enthusiastic computer collection (thanks, eBay!), I was down to one computer. Unfortunately, as a rather long in the tooth MacBook Air, it’s no longer suited to my needs and neither is it upgradeable. I got all … Continue reading
Posted in freesoftware, GNU, UI
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I didn’t study computer science at school or university, and still manage to work as a programmer. That is not to say that I don’t need to know some things that are taught on computer science courses. Just this week … Continue reading
Something old, something new
Sometimes, what you want out of a software system is something unexciting. Something proven to work, that’s well-understood, and has had all of the kinks smoothed out over years (or even decades) of refinement. Of course, what you get when … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
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Dogmatic paradigmatism
First, you put all of your faith in structured programming, and you got burned. You found it hard to associate the operations in your software with the data upon which they act, and to make sure that the expectations made … Continue reading
