APPropriate Behaviour, the book on things programmers do that aren’t programming, is now complete! The final chapter – a philosophy of software making – has been added, concluding the book. Just because it’s complete, doesn’t mean it’s finished: as my understanding of what we do develops I’ll probably want to correct things, or add new [...]
This posted was motivated by Rob Rix’s bug report on NSObject, “Split NSObject protocol into logical sub-protocols”. He notes that NSObject provides multiple responsibilities[*]: hashing, equality checking, sending messages, introspecting and so on. What that bug report didn’t look at was the rest of NSObject‘s functionality that isn’t in the NSObject protocol. The class itself [...]
I just signed a piece of card so that I could take a picture of it, clean it up and attach it to a document, pretending that I’d printed the document out, signed it, and scanned it back in. I do that about once a year (it was more frequent when I ran my own [...]
From the British Psychological Society blog: Engaging lecturers can breed overconfidence. The students who’d seen the smooth lecturer thought they would do much better than did the students who saw the awkward lecturer, consistent with the idea that a fluent speaker breeds confidence. In fact, both groups of students fared equally well in the test. [...]
In the most recent episode of Edge Cases, Wolf and Andrew discuss dependency management, specifically as it pertains to Objective-C applications that import libraries using the Cocoapods tool. In one app I worked on a few years ago, two different libraries each tried to include (as part of the libraries themselves, not as dependencies) the [...]
My password with my bank may as well be “I can’t remember, can we go through the security questions please?” That’s my answer so many times when they ask, and every time it gets me in via a slightly tedious additional verification step. Losing customers probably represents a greater financial risk to them than fraud [...]
One of the interesting aspects of Smalltalk and similar languages including Objective-C and Ruby is that while the object model exposes a hierarchy of classes, consumers of objects in these environments are free to ignore the position of the object in that hierarchy. The hierarchy can be thought of as a convenience: on the one [...]
That was the subject of this lunchtime’s vague thinking out loud. The problems with categories are well-known: you can override the methods already declared on a class, or the methods provided in another category (and therefore another category can replace your implementations too). Your best protection is to use ugly wartifying prefixes in the hope [...]
I just pushed another update to APPropriate Behaviour, my work on the things programmers do that aren’t programming. There’s some refinement to the existing material to be done, and a couple of short extra chapters to finish and add. But then it will be complete! The recommended price of APPropriate Behaviour is $20. While it’s [...]
Imagine someone took the training wheels off of Objective-C. That’s how I currently feel. I’ve actually had a long—erm, not quite “love-hate”, more “‘sup?-meh”—relationship with Ruby. I’ve long wanted to tinker but never really had a project where I could make it fit; I did learn a little about Rails a couple of years back [...]
