OrchardNest

I only have 17 years of experience, but every point on this list accords with my experience. I’ve made my own attempt to catalogue things software developers should know (that are not writing code), but this is a succinct and …...

The “return a command” trick This is a nice trick, but we need a phrase for that thing where you implement extreme late binding of functions by invoking an active function that selects the function you want based on its …...

The biggest missing feature in the manifesto for agile software development and the principles behind it is anyone other than the makers and their customer. We get autonomous, self-organising delivery teams but without the sense of...

I know that there are bigger problems to discuss about Apple’s approach to business and partnerships at the mo, but their handling of security researchers seems particularly cynical and hypocritical. See, for example, this post about...

I was having a think about this short history of Objective-C, and it occurred to me that perhaps I had been thinking about ObjC wrong. Now, I realise that by thinking about ObjC at all I mark myself out as … Continue reading →

There’s been a bit of a thing about software user experience going off the rails lately. Some people don’t like cross-platform software, and think that it isn’t as consistent, as well-integrated, or as empathetic as native software. Some...

Respectable persons of this parish of Internet have been, shall we say, critical of Scrum and its ability to help makers (particularly software developers) to make things (particularly software). Ron Jeffries and GeePaw Hill have both...

In my experience, the best way to get a high-quality software product is to take your time, not crunch to some deadline. On one project I led, after a couple of months we realised that the feature goals (ALL of … Continue reading...

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...