APPropriate Behaviour
The book about all the things software writers do that aren't writing software.
FSF
Author Archives: Graham
By doing it and helping others do it
We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. It’s been 20 years since those words were published in the manifesto for agile software development, and capital-A Agile methods haven’t really been supplanted. … Continue reading
What Xamarin.Forms taught me about data bindings
I’ve spent about a year working on an app for a group in the University where I work, that needed to be available on both Android and iOS. I’ve got a bit of experience working with the Apple-supplied SDKs on … Continue reading
Posted in mono, msft
5 Comments
Whoever “wins”, software freedom loses
I’d like to start by recapping the three distinct categories of interest in software freedom. This is definitely my categorisation, though only the third is novel and the first two have long histories of common recognition so this is hardly … Continue reading
Posted in FLOSS, freesoftware, fsf, GNU
1 Comment
One person per task
One of the least teamy things I see with software teams is limiting the maximum and minimum number of items of work in process – tasks, stories, whatever you call them – both to the number of developers on the … Continue reading
Posted in team
4 Comments
The Vizzini Effect
A bunch of the topics I wanted to discuss all turned out to have a common basis, so I’m going to write the post about the commonality using a couple of examples from the specific topics for illumination. Maybe I’ll … Continue reading
Posted in whatevs
Leave a comment
“Best practice” is less of a scam than claimed
Another day, another developer explaining that they don’t follow some popular practice. And their reason? Nothing more than because other people do the thing. “Best practices don’t exist,” they airily intone. “They’re really mediocre practices”. In one sense, they’re correct. … Continue reading
Posted in whatevs
Leave a comment
[objc retain] stream
Starting next week: [objc retain]; in which Steven Baker and I live-code Objective-C on a modern free software platform. Wednesday, February 10th, 1900UTC. More info at objc-retain.com.
Posted in gnustep, objc
Leave a comment
“Reasoning about code” is a scam
Another day, another post telling me to do something, or not do something, or adopt some technology, or not adopt some technology, or whatever it is that they want me to do, because it makes it easier to “reason about … Continue reading
Posted in code-level
5 Comments
Ubiquitous computing
I, along with many others, have written about the influence of Xerox PARC on Apple. The NeXT workstation was a great example of getting an approximation to the Smalltalk concept out using off-the-shelf parts, and Jobs often presaged iCloud with … Continue reading
