APPropriate Behaviour
The book about all the things software writers do that aren't writing software.
FSF
Author Archives: Graham
In which I misunderstood Objective-C
I was having a think about this short history of Objective-C, and it occurred to me that perhaps I had been thinking about ObjC wrong. Now, I realise that by thinking about ObjC at all I mark myself out as … Continue reading
Posted in cocoa, design, freesoftware, gnustep, nextstep, objc
Tagged History of Software Engineering
1 Comment
Why you didn’t like that thing that company made
There’s been a bit of a thing about software user experience going off the rails lately. Some people don’t like cross-platform software, and think that it isn’t as consistent, as well-integrated, or as empathetic as native software. Some people don’t … Continue reading
Posted in UI
Leave a comment
On programmer behaviours that make Scrum so bad
Respectable persons of this parish of Internet have been, shall we say, critical of Scrum and its ability to help makers (particularly software developers) to make things (particularly software). Ron Jeffries and GeePaw Hill have both deployed the bullshit word. … Continue reading
Sleep on it
In my experience, the best way to get a high-quality software product is to take your time, not crunch to some deadline. On one project I led, after a couple of months we realised that the feature goals (ALL of … Continue reading
Posted in process, team
Leave a comment
My proposal for scaling open source: don’t
I’ve had a number of conversations about what “we” in the “free software community” “need” to do to combat the growth in proprietary, user-hostile and customer-hostile business models like cloud user-generated content hosts, social media platforms, hosted payment platforms, videoconferencing … Continue reading
Posted in whatevs
10 Comments
There is no “us” in team
I’ve talked before about the non-team team dynamic that is “one person per task”. Where the management and engineers collude to push the organisation beyond a sustainable pace by making sure that at all times, each individual is kept busy … Continue reading
An Imagined History of Object-Oriented Programming
Having looked at hopefully modern views on Object-Oriented analysis and design, it’s time to look at what happened to Object-Oriented Programming. This is an opinionated, ideologically-motivated history, that in no way reflects reality: a real history of OOP would require … Continue reading
A hopefully modern description of Object-Oriented Design
We left off in the last post with an idea of how Object-Oriented Analysis works: if you’re thinking that it used around a thousand words to depict the idea “turn nouns from the problem domain into objects and verbs into … Continue reading
A hopefully modern description of Object-Oriented Analysis
I’ve made a lot over the years, including the book, Object-Oriented Programming the Easy Way, of my assertion that one reason people are turned off from Object-Oriented Programming is that they weren’t doing Object-Oriented Design. Smalltalk was conceived as a … Continue reading
Posted in ooa/d
Leave a comment
