APPropriate Behaviour
The book about all the things software writers do that aren't writing software.
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Author Archives: Graham
Aphorism Considered Harmful
Recently Dan North asked the origin of the software design aphorism “make it work, make it right, make it fast”. Before delving into that story, it’s important to note that I had already heard this phrase. I don’t know where, … Continue reading
What is software engineering?
I suppose if I’m going to have a tagline like “from programming to software engineering”, we ought to have some kind of shared understanding of what that journey entails. It would be particularly useful to agree on the destination. The … Continue reading
Diagnosing a Docker image build problem
My Python script for Global.health was not running in production, because it couldn’t find some imports. Now the real solution is to package up the imports with setuptools and install them at runtime (we manage the environments with poetry), but … Continue reading
Posted in whatevs
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Halloween is Over
Back in 2016, I sent the following letter to Linux Voice, and it was published in issue 24 as the star letter. LV came to an end (and made all of their content available as Creative Commons) when they merged … Continue reading
Design Patterns On Trial
Back in 1999, the OOPSLA conference held a show trial for the “Gang of Four”: Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and John Vlissides. Five years earlier, they had released their book “Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software” at … Continue reading
Falsehoods These Programmers Believed About Countries
Well this was a hard-fought issue. Setting the scene: since April 2020 I’ve been working on Global.health: a Data Science Initiative, where we collate information about Covid-19 cases worldwide and make them available in a standard schema for analysis. In … Continue reading
Introducing the SICPers Newsletter
I write a lot about software engineering. I talk a lot about software engineering. And I read a lot about software engineering. And that stuff is scattered all over the interwebs. Well, some of it isn’t even there, it’s in … Continue reading
Posted in writing
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[objc retain]; continues apace
I just finished recording episode 35 of [objc retain]; the stream on Objective-C programming with Free Software that I co-host with Steven Baker. It is available on Twitch and you can subscribe there to get notified about new episodes. It … Continue reading
Posted in FLOSS, freesoftware, gnustep, objc
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On Apple’s swings and misses
There’s a trope in the Apple-using technologist world that when an Apple innovation doesn’t immediately succeed, they abandon it. It’s not entirely true, let’s see what actually happens. The quote in the above-linked item that supports the claim: “Apple has … Continue reading
Posted in AAPL, UI
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Licenses aren’t sufficient
Another recent issue in the world of “centralised open source dependency repositories were a bad idea” initiated by the central contradiction of free software. People want to both give everything away without limitation on who uses it or how, and … Continue reading
Posted in FLOSS
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