Cognitive neuroscience likes to assign functions to parts of the brain. This bit does planning. This part does short term memory. This piece perceives faces. Does that bit really do planning? If you cut it out and held it, would it plan for you? No. And that other bit doesn’t perceive faces without messages from … Read moreThe service you build doesn’t do a thing. It participates in a thing.
Developers talk about interfaces all the time. Even in the back end: APIs are crucial, because they let us connect our new programs into the world of existing software. They let us build on what exists. They let us build subsystems, and build higher-level systems using those. In real life, I talk about interfaces. An … Read moreDeveloping software teaches us to design interfaces.
I don’t want to make my programs simpler. I want to them make them complicated instead of complex.
We can develop things faster than we can define them. @jryanday I’ve remarked before that @cdupuis can implement new features way faster than I can document them. This is not ridiculous; creating something is often faster than connecting it to existing people who can use it. Ryan took this farther: we can’t even define what … Read moreDesign by implementation
Developers have a love-hate relationship with code re-use. As in, we used to love it. We love our code and we want it to run everywhere and help everyone. We want to get faster with time by harnessing the work of our former selves.And yet, we come to hate it. Reuse means dependencies. It means … Read moreReuse
How important is correctness? This is a raging debate in our industry today. I think the answer depends strongly on the kind of problem a developer is trying to solve: is the problem contracting or expanding? A contracting problem is well-defined, or has the potential to be well-defined with enough rigorous thought. An expanding problem … Read moreCorrectness
Every conference has little themes for me. Here’s one from Philly ETE this week. The opening keynote from Tom Igoe, founder of Arduino, displayed examples of unique and original projects. Many of them were built for one person – a device to tell her mother whether she’s taken this pill already today, or to help … Read morePhilly ETE, Design in the small
At my very first programming job, I learned a distinction between two kinds of data: Reference and Application. Application data is produced by the application, consumed and modified by the software. It is customers, orders, events, inventory. It changes and grows all the time. Typically a new deployment of the app starts with no application … Read moreApplication vs. Reference Data
The other day at Outpace, while breaking some coupling, Eli and I decided to retain some information from one run of our program to another. We need to bookmark how far we read in each input data table. How can we persist this small piece of data? Let’s put it in a file. Sure, that’ll … Read moreA victory for abstraction, re-use, and small libraries
Maybe software is like a tree. The applications, websites, games that people use are the leaves. They’re the important part of the tree, because they’re useful. They solve real problems and improve lives, they make money, they entertain. The leaves are built upon the wood of the tree, branches and trunk: all the libraries and … Read moreSoftware is a tree