APPropriate Behaviour
The book about all the things software writers do that aren't writing software.
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Category Archives: books
APPosite Concerns
I’ve started another book project: APPosite Concerns is in the same series as, and is somehow a sequel to, APPropriate Behaviour. So now I just have one question to ask. What is going to be in the book? This question … Continue reading
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Intra-curricular activities
I’m apparently fascinated by the idea of defining curricula for learning programming. I’ve written about how we need to be careful what we try to pay forward from the way we learned in the past, and I’ve talked about how … Continue reading
Posted in academia, advancement of the self, books, edjercashun, learning
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Preparing for Computing’s Big One-Oh-Oh
However you slice the pie, we’re between two and three decades away from the centenary celebration for applied computing (which is of course significantly after theoretical or hypothetical advances made by the likes of Lovelace, Turing and others). You might … Continue reading
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The code you wrote six months ago
We have this trope in programming that you should hate the code you wrote six months ago. This is a figurative way of saying that you should be constantly learning and assimilating new ideas, so that you can look at … Continue reading
Posted in advancement of the self, books, code-level, learning, Responsibility, software-engineering, Talk
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Meta-writing
Barely 4,000 years ago, documents were written on heavy, clay tablets. The Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the earliest known works of fiction, was written on 11 such tablets with a 12th added later. There was only one thing you … Continue reading
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APPropriate Behaviour is complete!
APPropriate Behaviour, the book on things programmers do that aren’t programming, is now complete! The final chapter – a philosophy of software making – has been added, concluding the book. Just because it’s complete, doesn’t mean it’s finished: as my … Continue reading
APPropriate Behaviour is almost done
I just pushed another update to APPropriate Behaviour, my work on the things programmers do that aren’t programming. There’s some refinement to the existing material to be done, and a couple of short extra chapters to finish and add. But … Continue reading
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I just updated Appropriate Behaviour
The new release of Appropriate Behaviour—the book about things programmers should do that aren’t programming—is now up. The most obvious, and most awesome, change in this update is a fabulous new cover, designed by Sebastian Hermida of leanpubcovers.com. Should you … Continue reading
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Does the history of making software exist?
A bit of a repeated theme in the construction of APPropriate Behaviour has been that I’ve tried to position certain terms or concepts in their historical context, and found it difficult, or impossible to do so with sufficient rigour. There’s … Continue reading
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An observation designed to aid the reading of books on software
Wherever a book on writing software describes the 1968 NATO conference in Garmisch on Software Engineering, consider whether the clarity of the argument can be improved by adding the following parenthetical clause: […], a straw man version of an otherwise … Continue reading
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