APPropriate Behaviour
The book about all the things software writers do that aren't writing software.
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Category Archives: software-engineering
On interviewing and generalist software engineers
After publishing podcast Episode 53: Specialism versus generality, Alan Francis raised a good point: This could be very timely as I ponder my life as a generalist who has struggled when asked to fit in a neat box career wise. … Continue reading
Posted in software-engineering
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The Requirements Trifecta
It’s hard to argue that any one approach to, well, anything in software is better or worse than any others, because very few people are collecting any data and even fewer are reporting what they’re trying. Worst is understanding how … Continue reading
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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
Software design is refinement, not abstraction
James Koppel tells us that software engineers keep using the word “abstraction” and that he does not think it means what they think it means. I believe that he is correct, and that the confusion over the term abstraction comes … Continue reading
Why are we like this?
The recent post on addressing “technical debt” did the rounds of the usual technology forums, where it raised a reasonable question: why are people basing these decisions on balancing engineering-led with customer-led tasks on opinion? Why don’t engineers take an … Continue reading
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Having the right data
In the beginning there was the relational database, and it was…OK, I guess. It was based on the relational model, and allowed operations that were within the relational algebra. I mean it actually didn’t. The usual standard for relational databases … Continue reading
What is software engineering?
I suppose if I’m going to have a tagline like “from programming to software engineering”, we ought to have some kind of shared understanding of what that journey entails. It would be particularly useful to agree on the destination. The … Continue reading
On UML
A little context: I got introduced to UML in around 2008, at an employer who had a site licence for Enterprise Architect. I was sent on a training course run by a company that no longer exists called Sun Microsystems: … Continue reading
Posted in agile, architecture of sorts, design, software-engineering, sunw, tool-support
Tagged History of Software Engineering
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Discipline doesn’t scale
If programmers were just more disciplined, more professional, they’d write better software. All they need is a code of conduct telling them how to work like those of us who’ve worked it out. The above statement is true, which is … Continue reading
The feature constraint
If you’re in a purely software business, your constraining resource is often (not always, not even necessarily in most cases, but often) the rate at which software gets changed. Well, specifically, the rate at which software gets changed in a … Continue reading
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