OrchardNest

I’ve had a number of conversations about what “we” in the “free software community” “need” to do to combat the growth in proprietary, user-hostile and customer-hostile business models like cloud...

I’ve talked before about the non-team team dynamic that is “one person per task”. Where the management and engineers collude to push the organisation beyond a sustainable pace by making sure that at all times, each individual is kept busy...

It was requested on twitter that I start answering community questions on the podcast. I’ve got a few to get the ball rolling, but what would you like to ask? Comment here, or reach me wherever you know I hang … Continue...

Having looked at hopefully modern views on Object-Oriented analysis and design, it’s time to look at what happened to Object-Oriented Programming. This is an opinionated, ideologically-motivated history, that in no way reflects reality: a...

We left off in the last post with an idea of how Object-Oriented Analysis works: if you’re thinking that it used around a thousand words to depict the idea “turn nouns from the problem domain into objects and verbs into … Continue...

I’ve made a lot over the years, including the book, Object-Oriented Programming the Easy Way, of my assertion that one reason people are turned off from Object-Oriented Programming is that they weren’t doing Object-Oriented Design....

I’ve never been famous enough in tech circles to warrant a post on uses this, but the joy of running your own blog is that you get to indulge any narcissistic tendencies with no filter. So here we go! The … Continue reading...

Robert Atkins linked to his post on industry malaise: All over the place I see people who got their start programming with “view source” in the 2000s looking around at the state of web application development and thinking, “Hey wait...

My current host name scheme at home is characters from the film Tron. So I have: Laptop: flynn (programmer, formerly at Encom, and arcade owner) Desktop: yori (programmer at Encom) TV box: dumont (runs the I/O terminal) Watch: bit (a...

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...

Or rather, I do use version control when I’m writing, and it isn’t helpful. I’m currently studying a PhD, and I have around 113k words of notes in a git repository. I also have countless words of notes in a …...

We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. It’s been 20 years since those words were published in the manifesto for agile software development, and capital-A Agile methods haven’t...

I’ve spent about a year working on an app for a group in the University where I work, that needed to be available on both Android and iOS. I’ve got a bit of experience working with the Apple-supplied SDKs on … Continue...

Another day, another developer explaining that they don’t follow some popular practice. And their reason? Nothing more than because other people do the thing. “Best practices don’t exist,” they airily intone. “They’re really mediocre...

Starting next week: [objc retain]; in which Steven Baker and I live-code Objective-C on a modern free software platform. Wednesday, February 10th, 1900UTC. More info at objc-retain.com.

Another day, another post telling me to do something, or not do something, or adopt some technology, or not adopt some technology, or whatever it is that they want me to do, because it makes it easier to “reason about the...

I, along with many others, have written about the influence of Xerox PARC on Apple. The NeXT workstation was a great example of getting an approximation to the Smalltalk concept out using off-the-shelf parts, and Jobs often presaged iCloud...

LIVEstep is a GNUstep desktop on a FreeBSD live CD, and it comes with the GNUstep developer tools including ProjectCenter. This video is a “Hello, World” walkthrough using ProjectCenter on LIVEstep. PC is much more influenced...

Here’s what I’ve been working on (with others, of course) since February.

You may remember in July I updated the open source Bean word processor to work with then-latest Xcode and macOS. Over the last couple of days I’ve added iCloud Drive support (obviously only if the app is associated with an App Store...

People say that the internet, or maybe specifically the web, holds the world’s information and makes it accessible. Maybe there was a time when that was true. But currently it’s not: probably not because the information is missing, but...

The new M1 chip in the new Macs has 8-16GB of DRAM on the package, just like many mobile phones or single-board computers. But unlike many desktop, laptop or workstation computers (there are exceptions). In the first tranche of Macs using...

In case you ever need it. If you’re searching for something like “deleted login shell Mac can’t open terminal”, this is the post for you. I just deleted my login shell (because it was installed with homebrew, and I...

Thinking back over the last couple of years, I’ve had to know quite a bit about a few different topics to be able to write good software. Those topics: Epidemiology Architecture Plant Sciences Histology Education Not much knowledge...

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...

I had an item in OmniFocus to “write on why I wish I was still using my 2006 iBook”, and then Tim Sneath’s tweet on unboxing a G4 iMac sealed the deal. I wish I was still using my 2006 iBook. I had been using NeXTSTEP for...

I had need to test an application built for Linux, and didn’t want to run a whole desktop in a window using Virtualbox. I found the bits I needed online in various forums, but nowhere was it all in one place. It is now!...

In The Manifesto for Anarchic Software Development I noted that one of the agile manifesto principles is for self-organising teams, and that those tend not to exist in software development. What would a self-organising software team look...

Someone has been trolling Apple’s Siri team hard on how they think numbers are pronounced. Today is the second day where I’ve missed a turn due to it. The first time because I didn’t understand the direction, the second because the...

Go on, read the manifesto again. You’ll see that it’s a manifesto for anarchism, for people coming together and contributing equally toward solving problems. From each according to their ability, to each according to their need. The best...

Tomorrow evening (for me; 1800UTC on 10th Sept) Steven R. Baker and I will twitch-stream our journey learning how to write Amiga software. Check out dosamigans.tv!

The whole “Free as in beer versus free as in freedom” thing confuses people. Or maybe it doesn’t, and it allows detractors to sow fear, uncertainty and doubt over free software by feigning confusion. Either way, people express confusion....