Month: February 2012

I often compare software development with building houses or woodworking.  I sometimes even compare software development with the vocation of electrician.  In each of these other vocations, craftspeople need to go through a period of apprenticeship and mentoring before being “allowed” to practice their craft.  In each of these vocations there are a series of rules that apply to a lot of the basics of what what they do.  With building houses there are techniques and principles that are regulated by building codes; with electricians there’s techniques and fundamentals that are effectively regulated by electrical codes and standards.  It’s one … Continue reading Software Design and First Principles–Part 0: Concepts of Object Orientation

I think Windows XP was the first real release of Windows–it had finally gotten to a usability and stability point that people could accept.  The Microsoft support model changed shortly after Windows XP was released to basically support any piece of software for as long as ten years (if you paid extra for support roughly 2 years after a successive version was released). To paraphrase a famous law: software becomes obsolete every 18 months.  That was true for a long time; but hardware and software isn’t improving at that rate any more.   Software has basically caught up with existing hardware … Continue reading The Flawed Eventually-upgrade Software Model

Mark Seemann recently had a great post that, as most of his posts seem to do, challenges the average reader to re-think their reality a bit.  The post is titled “Is Layering Worth the Mapping”.  In the post Mark essentially details some of the grief and friction that developers face when they need to decouple two or more concepts by way of an abstraction. Mark takes the example of layering.  Layering is a one way coupling between two “layers” where the “higher-level” layer takes a dependency on abstractions in a “lower-level” layer.  Part of his example is a UI layer … Continue reading The Rat-hole of Object-oriented Mapping