A magazine about programmers, code, and society. Written by and for humans since 2018.
by Adrian Kosmaczewski, May 2nd, 2022
Developers new to the iOS platform are completely (and thankfully) unaware of its rocky start during its initial years. The first iPhone was announced on January 9th, 2007, and was released in the United States on June 29th that year. The iPhone SDK was announced by Steve Jobs in October 2007, and released in March 2008. But even before the official SDK was first announced, people were already "jailbreaking" the device, and thereby making applications for the iPhone. First-generation iPhone and iPad developers will surely chuckle when reading the words "PwnageTool," "JailbreakMe," and the name of the first App Store, also known as "Cydia."
by Graham Lee, April 4th, 2022
We are told that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce. This is certainly true of the history of computing, at least as far as its telling is concerned.
by Adrian Kosmaczewski, March 7th, 2022
In the 2008 book "Dreams That Glitter", telling the story of the English pop group Girls Aloud, one of its members, the late Sarah Harding, said: "I've got a t-shirt that says 'Well-behaved women don't make history'. Funny how the stylist gave that to me…"
by Adrian Kosmaczewski, January 3rd, 2022
If there is one thing that computer books are most definitely not usually praised for, it is their visuals. Thankfully, books about user experience and user interface design are usually, indeed, worthy of such acclaim. In this case, however, limiting a review to such criteria would be short-sighted, poor, and unjust. The truth is that most important literature works are multi-layered, profound, and suitable for multiple relectures.
by Graham Lee, June 7th, 2021
As soon as Adrian and I agreed that Management would be the topic of this issue, I knew that I would share the benefits of Camille Fournier's book, The Manager's Path. It is the most succinct introduction to software engineering management for both managers and the managed out there.
by Adrian Kosmaczewski, May 4th, 2020
The history of programming language books can be roughly divided in three distinctive eras. The first one stretches from the beginnings of programming to the mid 1970s. Programming books from those times were an often underestimated byproduct of the marketing budget of big companies such as IBM, and inherited the dry approach of most engineering books in the post-war era.
by Graham Lee, April 6th, 2020
These days, it's hard to appreciate that Object-Oriented Programming is so easy, it was taught to kids in junior high before it was ever taught to adults. As supposedly senior software engineers debate whether a Car truly "is a" Vehicle, and whether it wouldn't be easier to learn lambda calculus and determine the median monad blog post than to reflect the real objects in the real-world problem they're solving in their software, it seems reasonable to ask: is it really so difficult?
by Adrian Kosmaczewski, March 2nd, 2020
From October 24th to 29th, 1927, twenty-nine scientists gathered in Brussels for the fifth Solvay Conference. Among the attendees, of which seventeen got a Nobel Prize before or after attending, were Erwin Schrödinger, Wolfgang Pauli, Werner Heisenberg, Paul Dirac, Louis de Broglie, Max Born, Niels Bohr, Max Planck, Marie Curie, Hendrik Lorentz, and Albert Einstein. One might think there might have not been such an assembly of brilliant thinkers since the Platonic Academy.
by Graham Lee, February 3rd, 2020
Many developers will have heard of Barbara Liskov, through her appearance in Robert C. Martin's SOLID list of design principles. The abstract of her 1994 paper with Jeanette Wing, A Behavioral Notion of Subtyping, makes the principle sound easy in, well, in principle.
by Marie-Cécile Godwin Paccard, April 1st, 2019
We need to talk about work. "Work? What's wrong with work?" you may ask. You would be right to do so. A couple of years back, I might have asked the same thing. From the outside, nothing is wrong with the world of work, nor the workplace. Especially in the tech industry, right? Most of us get pretty good perks and we no longer have to spend 40 years of our life fiddling around for 12 hours a day on a production line like our elders. Metaphorically speaking, of course…