APPropriate Behaviour
The book about all the things software writers do that aren't writing software.
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Category Archives: software-engineering
Technical debt and jury service
We have the idea that in addition to the product development backlogs for our teams, there’s an engineering backlog where technical debt paydown, process/tooling improvements, and other sitewide engineering concerns get recorded. Working on them is done in time that … Continue reading
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Literate Programming with LibreOffice
This post comes in the form of an OpenDocumentFormat document containing a program that can extract programs from ODF documents, including the program contained in this document.
Posted in code-level, software-engineering, tool-support
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I just want to point out that even the best of us aren’t doing what we expect the makers of acne creams to do. What we actually know about software development, and why we believe it’s true by Greg Wilson.
Working Effectively with Legacy Code
I gave a talk to my team at ARM today on Working Effectively with Legacy Code by Michael Feathers. Here are some notes I made in preparation, which are somewhat related to the talk I gave. This may be the … Continue reading
Posted in advancement of the self, books, code-level, learning, software-engineering, TDD
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A full-stack software engineer is someone who is comfortable working at any layer, from code and systems through team members to customers.
The package management paradox
There was no need to build a package management system since CPAN, and yet npm is the best. Wait, what? Every time a new programming language or framework is released, people seem to decide that: It needs its own package … Continue reading
Dogmatic paradigmatism
First, you put all of your faith in structured programming, and you got burned. You found it hard to associate the operations in your software with the data upon which they act, and to make sure that the expectations made … Continue reading
Layers of Distraction
A discussion I was involved in over on Facebook reminded me of some other issues I’d already drafted for this blog, so I stuck the two together and here we are. Software systems can often be seen as aggregations of … Continue reading
Joe Armstrong thinks we don’t need modules in software. Instead, all functions should have unique names and be published in a global database.
The reasonable effectiveness of developer tools
In goals upon goals upon goals, I suggested that a fixation on developer tools is misplaced. This is not to say that developer tools are unhelpful, nor that they can’t have a significant impact on our work. Consider the following, … Continue reading
Posted in software-engineering, tool-support
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