APPropriate Behaviour
The book about all the things software writers do that aren't writing software.
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Category Archives: performance
On or Between
The new way to model concurrency is with coroutines (1963), i.e. the async/await dance or (building upon) call-with-concurrent-continuation. The new new way is with actors (1973), and the old and busted ways are with threads (1966), and promises (1976). As … Continue reading
Mature Optimization
This comment on why NetNewsWire is fast brings up one of the famous tropes of computer science: The line between [performance considerations pervading software design] and premature optimization isn’t clearly defined. If only someone had written a whole paper about … Continue reading
More speed, lower velocity
I frequently meet software teams who describe themselves as “high velocity”, they even have graphs coming from Jira to prove it, and yet their ability to ship great software, to delight their customers, or even to attract their customers, doesn’t … Continue reading
Posted in Business, performance, process, software-engineering
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Concurrent objects and SCOOP
Representing concurrency in an object-oriented system has been a long-standing problem. Encapsulating the concurrency primitives via objects and methods is easy enough, but doesn’t get us anywhere. We still end up composing our programs out of threads and mutexes and … Continue reading
On the lesser presentations
Advice on presentations – including that given on this blog, is often geared toward the “showbusiness” presentation. We’re usually talking about the big conference talk or product launch, where you can afford to put in the time to make a … Continue reading
Posted in performance, Talk
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Improving a presentation with slides
Take a look at your slides. For each slide, think how you would present the same information if you didn’t have the slide. Practise that, so that you can give the information on the slide without using the slide as … Continue reading
Posted in performance, Talk
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Honestly, this next post will take a while.
About 10 years ago, we decided that the performance gains in single-core processors that come “for free” with advancing semiconductor processes were slowing down. Many chip makers switched to scaling the number of cores on a die, and promoted parallel … Continue reading
Separating user interface from work
Here’s a design I’ve had knocking around my head for a while, and between a discussion we had a few weeks ago at work and Saul Mora’s excellent design patterns talk at QCon I’ve built it. A quick heads-up: currently … Continue reading
Posted in code-level, OOP, performance, Talk
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A two-dimensional dictionary
What? A thing I made has just been open-sourced by my employers at Agant: the AGTTwoDimensionalDictionary works a bit like a normal dictionary, except that the keys are CGPoints meaning we can find all the objects within a given rectangle. … Continue reading
Posted in code-level, iPad, iPhone, Mac, OOP, performance, software-engineering
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