Tag "software"

Last week I was celebrating the 20 years of my Harman Kardon SoundSticks, but last Monday there was another anniversary that some of us celebrated fondly: EditPlus 1.0, released March 20th, 1998, is 25 years old!

The news recently splashed the demise, disappearance, and final “good riddance” of Internet Explorer. I remembered the first time I encountered the beast. In 1997, Internet Explorer 4.0 was soooooo good compared to anything else, it was hard to believe.

There is a lot of discussion online these days about the relative benefits (and drawbacks) of being a generalist software developer.

Looking at the software industry, it appears that most big companies usually share more traits than they would like to admit.

It might sound incredible to younger developers out there, but there was a time when Git did not exist.

When James Patterson, one of the best-selling authors in the world, had the idea for “Honeymoon,” his 2005 novel, he started writing an outline.

Programming is a very opinionated activity. Unfortunately, those opinions are seldom based on facts, and most of them are futile, and lead to stupid arguments on Reddit or Hacker News or the comments section of a blog.

If you work in this industry for a certain amount of time you are certainly bound to suffer, at some point or another, the delicious experience of the programmer job interview.

Somewhere between the end of the Second World War and the beginning of the Cold War, when the enemy started speaking Russian instead of German, a US Navy programmer was working in an early computer, trying feverishly to solve a problem in a program.

This is the presentation I gave at the second App Builders Conference in Lausanne, Switzerland, April 25th, 2017.

This is the talk I gave at the Mobile Developer Summit, Bangalore, India, September 15th, 2016

Presentation given in Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine, on July 16th, 2016. In this session we are going to learn simple yet effective techniques to refactor large iOS codebases in order to make them more testable, to adapt them to be eventually rewritten in Swift, and to make them as “future proof” as possible.

What would be the place, in a museum like MoMA, of a collection of art dedicated to software?

As an iPhone developer, one of the simplest and easiest mechanisms you have to interact with other applications is through the use of iPhone URL Schemes.

Software Engineering is the youngest of all the professions, being born around 50 years ago, but since then it has been continually improved.

Many companies, at some point of their history, ask themselves a simple question: what programming language should I use?

There’s an interesting discussion going on these days on Ruby blogs about, basically, how to avoid one of the most common, annoying, easy-to-create bugs in any programming language: calling a method on a null reference (or pointer, depending on your language).

One of the best learning tools I have found in my career is to take someone else’s code, and to modify it slightly to see what happens, to play with it, and eventually to release that code in this blog, or send it to the original author, fixing it somehow or adding some feature:

Charles Petzold, in its book “Code”, states the following: In theory, application programs are supposed to access the hardware of the computer only through the interfaces provided by the operating system.

One of the most pragmatically influential changes in software development, since the late eighties, was the introduction of several object-oriented frameworks, in different programming languages.

Trying to keep my promise of learning a new programming language every year, I have identified a couple of candidates for 2007:

Beginning 1998, nearly 9 years ago, I created this tool at my former employer’s site.

I have just posted a page in the site, about a recent project I’ve done, implementing a simple stack-based calculator, similar to those HP ones: it is called Calculator, and you can find it under the Project pages.