OrchardNest

Welcome to the thirty-fourth issue of De Programmatica Ipsum, dedicated to the subject of the Job Market. In this edition, Adrian describes the painful recent evolution of the Swiss tech job market; Graham reflects on the difficulties of...

Until the mid-90s, the Swiss job market required two things of anyone interested in pursuing a career in management in any major local industry: a university degree… and a grade in the Swiss Army. As a consequence, in the Swiss side of my...

It is very easy to get information about career progression in the software engineering world, but very hard to get good information about it. To understand how the various problems collude to stop us learning about our own career paths,...

There was a time when I advertised my services as "Ruby on Rails" programmer. It was by that time that I got to learn the names and work of many people in that field; many of whom had come from the J2EE world, were tired of configuring...

Welcome to the thirty-third issue of De Programmatica Ipsum, dedicated to the subject of Management. In this edition, Graham analyzes the root causes of dysfunctional teams and how to solve them; Adrian argues that the chasm between...

It is going to be hard to write anything about management for this month's issue, because the entire field is moribund. There has been no innovation in management for decades, supposed sea changes in thought have either failed to take hold...

To a large extent, most of the software team managers I met in the course of my career were not able to judge neither the qualities nor the techniques required to create a software artifact. They were incapable of understanding the very...

As soon as Adrian and I agreed that Management would be the topic of this issue, I knew that I would share the benefits of Camille Fournier's book, The Manager's Path. It is the most succinct introduction to software engineering management...

Welcome to the thirty-second issue of De Programmatica Ipsum, dedicated to the subject of Modernism. In this edition Adrian bets on Rust to become the modern programming language of the 2020s, Graham argues that convergence is a fad in the...

The book "Writing Secure Code, 2nd Edition" written by David LeBlanc and Michael Howard, published by Microsoft Press in 2002, was once required reading at Microsoft, following Bill Gates' "Trustworthy Computing" memo. The fifth chapter of...

Writing a draft for this post was as easy on an HP OmniGo 100 from 1995 as on any modern computer. Arguably easier, because I was not distracted by social media, notifications, or the possibility of a quick dip into another task. There is...

Once upon a time, there was no GitHub, no iPhone, no AWS, no Android, no Google App Engine, no Stack Overflow, no Docker, no Kubernetes, no Rust, no Go, no Swift, no Kotlin, no Git, actually Subversion was barely starting to appear in the...

Welcome to the thirty-first issue of De Programmatica Ipsum, dedicated to the subject of the English Language. In this edition, Graham explains the conflicting relationship of programming language designers with English; Adrian dives into...

There is a section in the book AppleScript: the Definitive Guide by Matt Neuburg (Covers Mac OS X Panther!) called "The English-likeness monster". In this section, Neuburg lists various difficulties that arise from AppleScript's...

You surely heard that old story, where one fish asks another "how is the water today?" and the second replies, "what the hell is water?" Similarly, few of us seem to think about English. It is all around us.

It is a fairly well-known, but perhaps not broadly appreciated, fact that Apple's Macintosh could have been a very different computer. Sometimes known as the father of the Mac, sometimes as its eccentric uncle, the project was originally...

Welcome to the thirtieth issue of De Programmatica Ipsum, dedicated to the subject of Home Office. In this edition, Adrian explores the conditio sine qua non required for telecommuting to develop and thrive; Graham analyzes the economics...

In 1997 I moved back to Argentina to start a career in software engineering in a small web startup. They were in such a small office in the outskirts of Buenos Aires, that my boss told me to go to the phone company, and get a new phone...

Welcome to the twenty-ninth issue of De Programmatica Ipsum, dedicated to the subject of Internet of Things. In this edition, Graham tells his own personal IoT story filled with pain and irony; Adrian argues that the IoT industry is the...

This issue of De Programmatica Ipsum comes out as I have been in my current house for four years. The previous owners had installed a smart thermostat to control the heating and hot water, and had left it and the control hub along with all...

Reading this magazine is a political act. When choosing between Pravda or the Financial Times; Fox News or PBS; Daring Fireball or Paul Thurrott's SuperSite for Windows, a reader should know what those publications stand for. Every...

You may be worried that I am going to talk about an author of books that are not about programming, and you are correct and incorrect. Correct, in that Hofstadter's books are not about programming (the intellectually hollow like to claim...

Welcome to the twenty-eigth issue of De Programmatica Ipsum, dedicated to the subject of Programming as a Hobby. In this edition, Adrian explains how hobbies prevent specialization from taking over our minds; Graham argues that the current...

There is a whole field called "Recreational Mathematics;" a moniker that might as well be replaced with "Mathematics as a Hobby." I personally enjoy dabbling in it a lot; I am mostly interested in number theory feats: Ramanujan's...

There is a common trope that says we would get more children interested in programming as a hobby if programming as a hobby was like the programming our generation did as a hobby. By our generation, I mean a broad swathe of people in WEIRD...

Imagine that you are a fourth grader in California, in 1973. You were 6 or 7 when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon, and there were still astronauts up there just last year. On the radio you can hear Pink Floyd, Elton John...

Welcome to the twenty-seventh issue of De Programmatica Ipsum, dedicated to the subject of Networking. In this edition, Graham explores one of the most mysterious slogans of all time in the computer industry; Adrian recalls his first steps...

Back in the mists of time, an early Sun Microsystems employee by the name of John Gage coined the term "the network is the computer" to describe the centrality Sun put on network capabilities when designing their workstations.

I remember vividly the first time I saw somebody "online." It was early in a morning of December 1994, in the hallways of the "Sciences 2" building of the University of Geneva. One of my classmates, who worked part-time as a professional...

I almost wrote this article not about McConnell, but Microsoft Press. Why? Because developers always have something to learn, books have been a great way to share information for centuries, so reading about computing is central to the...

Welcome to the twenty-sixth issue of De Programmatica Ipsum, focused on the subject of Hardware. In this edition, Adrian argues that hardware has lost the marketing appeal it had decades ago; Graham investigates the reasons behind the...

My first serious attempt at understanding computer hardware happened during college, in 1994. One of the labs consisted in wiring a 4-bit processor to a series of switches and a LED display. The objective was to make a very simple...