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 her keynote speech at QCon London 2013 on The Power of Abstraction, Barbara Liskov referred to several papers contemporary with her work on abstract data types. I’ve collected these references and found links to free copies of the articles where available. Dijkstra 1968 Go To statement considered harmful Wirth 1971 Program development by stepwise [...]
I recently gave a talk to my colleagues about giving talks. Here is an annotated collection of the notes I made in preparation. – What do you want the audience to get out of the talk? As you’re constructing your talk, ensure that you’re actually satisfying your mission. If you want to inspire people, make [...]
This is a post that had been boiling for a while; I talked a little about the topic when I was in Appsterdam earlier this year, and had a few more thoughts which were completely supplanted and rearranged by watching
Don’t you hate those times when you go to a talk or article that says “you should be doing this”, but then doesn’t explain how to do that? I just wrote one. In “Coding. Standards.” I explained that what software engineers should do is to learn and analyse from all their experiences and interactions. But [...]
This post is being, um, posted from the venue for GOTO Copenhagen 2012. It’s the end result of a few months of reflection on what I get out of conferences, what I want to get out of conferences, what I put into (and want to put into) conferences and the position of tech conferences in [...]
I recently recorded a series of videos on unit testing and test-driven development for iOS developers with Scotty of iDeveloper.tv. The videos and associated source code is now available for purchase and download.
I was asked by attendees at my VTM talk on test-driven development a small collection of questions on a similar theme, which I’ll summarise here. How do I do TDD when my boss doesn’t want me to? What do I do when my boss wants me to ship untested prototype code? Can you give me [...]
I’ve just come off iDeveloper.TV Live with Scotty and John, where we were talking about the Mac app store. I had some material prepared about the security side of the app store that we didn’t get on to – here’s a quick write up. There’s a lot of discussion on twitter and the macsb mailing [...]
There’s a new IT security site over at Stack Exchange. Questions and answers on designing and implementing IT security policy, and on app security are all welcome. I’m currently a moderator at the site, but that’s just an interim thing while the site is being bootstrapped. Obviously, if people subsequently vote for me as a [...]
