APPropriate Behaviour
The book about all the things software writers do that aren't writing software.
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Category Archives: Business
The reality is not the abstraction
Remember that the abstractions you built to help you think about problems are there to help. They are not reality, and when you think of them as such they stop helping you, and they hold you back. You see this … Continue reading
Posted in Business
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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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In which I interview so you don’t have to
Describing job interviews for technical roles in the software industry to people who have left or have always been outside the software industry requires two things: patience on the part of the one doing the describing, and the ability for … Continue reading
Posted in advancement of the self, Business
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On running out of words
John Gruber’s subscription to Wiktionary expired: At just 20 percent of unit sales, Apple isn’t even close to a monopoly. At 92 percent profit share, they have a market dominance that rivals any actual monopoly the tech industry has ever … Continue reading
Posted in AAPL, Business
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The other pink dollar
How did (a very broad and collective) we go from selling NeXT at $440M to selling Tumblr at $1.1B, in under two decades? Why was Sun Microsystems, one of the most technologically advanced companies in the valley, only worth two … Continue reading
Posted in Business, economics
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It doesn’t take an Oracle to see that coming
Today has largely been brought to you by nostalgia brought about by this article, reporting on a get-together of former Sun Microsystems employees. I have never been a former Sun Microsystems employee, and of course now I never will be … Continue reading
The lighter side of open source
In a recent post I talked about the apolitical, amoral nature of open source software and how it puts the interests of a small programming class before the interests of the broad collection of people who interact with programmers’ output. … Continue reading
Posted in Business, economics
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