APPropriate Behaviour
The book about all the things software writers do that aren't writing software.
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Category Archives: learning
Staying power
You would imagine that by now I would have come to realise how long my attention span is and worked to find projects that fit within it, but no. This is one of the changes I need to make soon. … Continue reading
Posted in advancement of the self, books, learning, Talk
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It depends? It depends.
Sometimes you ask a question which has a small collection of actionable answers: yes or no. You ask someone who should be able to give that yes or no answer, and they go for the third: it depends. Maybe they … Continue reading
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That can’t possibly work.
A while back I was at a Facebook developer event, talking about techniques for analysing Objective-C. My summary of the problem was something like “it’s one of those things that works pretty well in the ivory towers of practice but … Continue reading
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Fuck. This. Shit.
Enough with the subtle allusions of the previous posts. What’s going on here is not right. It’s not right that I get to pass as a member of the group of people who can work in technology, while others have … Continue reading
Posted in advancement of the self, learning, Responsibility
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What it takes to “win” a discussion
You may have been to some kind of debate club at school, or at least had a debate in a class. If so, the debate you had was probably a competitive debate, and went something along these lines (causality is … 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
Posted in academia, advancement of the self, books, learning, Responsibility, software-engineering, tool-support
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Intuitive is the Enemy of Good
In the previous instalment, I discussed an interview in which Alan Kay maligned growth-restricted user interfaces. Here’s the quote again: There is the desire of a consumer society to have no learning curves. This tends to result in very dumbed-down … Continue reading
Software, Science?
Is there any science in software making? Does it make sense to think of software making as scientific? Would it help if we could? Hold on, just what is science anyway? Good question. The medieval French philosopher-monk Buridan said that … Continue reading
Posted in advancement of the self, learning, social-science, software-engineering
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It’s about solving problems
As ever, there’s a touchstone issue on the programmers’ corner of the intarwebs (the programmers’ corner is actually the same intarwebs everyone else is using, just we model it with geometry so it can have a corner). Here it is: … Continue reading
Posted in learning, Responsibility, TDD
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