Uses and Abuses of JiraI’ve been using Atlassian Jira for more than 20 years already at this point, and I have seen a fair share of patterns and antipatterns (that’s Japanese for “fuckups”) and, being the new rambling old man, I feel entitled to spread my dystopian views on the pages of this publication you’re reading right now.
Farewell to Software EngineersI recently ranted on Mastodon (as one usually does) about a persistent phenomenon, one which I’m quite tired of seeing in this dear software industry I happen to make a living with.
EditPlusLast 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!
Internet Explorer 4The 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.
On Being a GeneralistThere is a lot of discussion online these days about the relative benefits (and drawbacks) of being a generalist software developer.
Things That Define Big Software CompaniesLooking at the software industry, it appears that most big companies usually share more traits than they would like to admit. Take for example their products: at any given time, big software companies all had at least one product of various similar categories, roughly grouped in three big areas.
Memories of Centralized SCMsIt might sound incredible to younger developers out there, but there was a time when Git did not exist. In retrospect, the fact that Git has reigned supreme in its category for over 15 years was previously unheard of. SCM systems came and went in a steady succession since the early 1980s.
PlanningWhen James Patterson, one of the best-selling authors in the world, had the idea for “Honeymoon,” his 2005 novel, he started writing an outline. He iterated 5 or 6 different times until he got the right flow of the story, the right characters, the right bad guys, and the right conclusion. He showed the final version of his outline to publishers, and after some modifications he started writing the novel itself.
OpinionatedProgramming 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.
Job InterviewsIf 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.
BugsSomewhere 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.
The Developer Guide to Migrate Across GalaxiesThis is the presentation I gave at the second App Builders Conference in Lausanne, Switzerland, April 25th, 2017.
Making iOS Applications AccessibleThis is the talk I gave at the Mobile Developer Summit, Bangalore, India, September 15th, 2016
Refactoring iOS ProjectsPresentation 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.
MoMA and Software as an ArtWhat would be the place, in a museum like MoMA, of a collection of art dedicated to software?
Discovering a Hidden iPhone URL SchemeAs 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. These are so important that I’ve created a wiki page where I keep track of those I come across, including code samples that help me exchange data with them.
Olé, olé, oléI just stumbled into this amazing TED talk by Elizabeth Gilbert via James Duncan Davidson (@duncan in Twitter) and I want to share it with you with some very personal thoughts below.
Challenges for Software EngineersSoftware Engineering is the youngest of all the professions, being born around 50 years ago, but since then it has been continually improved. Practicers have fiercely debated upon it through the years, given the extremely fast pace of the innovations in the field, and the extremely difficult and inherently dynamic nature of software. Many trends have appeared and vanished, and many others will come.
On the Need of Minimalist PolyglotsMany companies, at some point of their history, ask themselves a simple question: what programming language should I use? The answer to this question is tricky, and has big, big consequences, for every single line of code of your future products will be written, read and suffered by it. This single choice defines the level of salaries you will have to pay, the skills of programmers you will have to deal with, the relative length and performance of your systems, the availability of tools (or lack thereof), the kind of support you will get (or not), the number of operating systems your code will work in, etc.
Null ReferencesThere’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).
That Nice Freedom of Modifying SoftwareOne 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:
About Operating Systems, Abstractions and APIsCharles 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.”
Application FrameworksOne 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. This article will provide a short overview of their impact in the software engineering field.
This Year's Programming LanguagesTrying to keep my promise of learning a new programming language every year, I have identified a couple of candidates for 2007:
Do-It-Yourself, Now and ThenBeginning 1998, nearly 9 years ago, I created this tool at my former employer’s site. It allowed customers to create their own web page, for a small fee, using all the interaction available at the time of Netscape Communicator and Internet Explorer 4. You could type some text here and there, choose some (awful, really) colors, and publish your page in a couple of minutes. A good number of people used it until 2001, when I left the company. Since then they’ve changed the graphic style of the page, but as far as I’ve seen, nothing else has changed. They have even left the 1998 Netscape and Internet Explorer logos…
Calculator ProjectI 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.