APPropriate Behaviour
The book about all the things software writers do that aren't writing software.
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Blog Archives
Episode 34: actually it’s about ethics in software engineering
An episode about the philosophy of software engineering.
Episode 33: Ask Me Anything
@sharplet asked me a few questions, and you can too! The theme music is Blue-Eyed Stranger. Evidence-Based Software Engineering Using R. Median household income in the UK in January 2021 was £29,900 (I said “about £28,000”). Median software engineer salary … Continue reading
Episode 32: freeing software from source code
I muse on a concept I’ve been thinking about for a long time: that software engineering is trapped within the confines of the fixed-width text editing paradigm. This was motivated by a discussion with Orta about his Shiki Twoslash project … Continue reading
Episode 31: Apple CPU transitions
I contextualise the x86_64 to arm64 transition by talking about all the other times Apple have switched CPUs in their personal computers; the timeline is roughly 6502-m68k-ppc-ppc+i386-ppc64-i386-x86_64-arm64. Sorry, Newton fans!
Episode 30: Digital Autonomy and Software Freedom
In which I posit that software freedom is a small part of a bigger picture. Free Software Foundation Free Software Foundation of Europe Software Freedom Conservancy Electronic Frontier Foundation [objc retain]; Just Consequentialism and Computing (paywalled; accessible link) Use the … Continue reading
Episode 29: Return to Software Engineering
This episode is about technology, culture, community, and career. No links because it’s mostly a personal history and there’s only so much self-promotion I can fit in one episode. That said! If you enjoy this podcast and would like to … Continue reading
Episode 28: Fascinating
In which I use this hacker news discussion on Agile to ask the question: has the poacher become the gamekeeper? I definitely talked about Questioning Extreme Programming by Pete McBreen, and Ron Jeffries has a take on that book too. … Continue reading
Episode 27: High-Performance Computing and the 1950s
In which we investigate the question why are climate models written in programming languages from 1950?, the discussion some programmers had about it, and the phenomenon that programmers seem to think that everybody else’s programming work just can’t be that … Continue reading
Episode 26: more engineering please
In which I discuss whether the reaction to traditional software engineering in works like Software Craftsmanship: the New Imperative didn’t throw out significant amounts of baby with the bathwater of waterfall processes and CASE. I also mention my popular post … Continue reading
Episode 25: A Theory of Software Engineering
In fact, while this is about a theory of software engineering, that doesn’t enter until the end of the show. Most of it is an attempt to incorrectly summarise the history of software engineering through analogy to the history of … Continue reading
