#development

I’m not saying apps these days need to be Frontier-like in any details. But it seems absolutely bizarre to me that we — we who write Mac and iOS apps — still have to build and run the app, make changes, build and run the app, and so on, all day long. In the year 2025.

Smart Rebuilds, Continuous Feedback, Live Updates, Snapshots, and a lot more. tilt up and grok your workflow.

Smart Rebuilds, Continuous Feedback, Live Updates, Snapshots, and a lot more. tilt up and grok your workflow.

But if you practice having a different response or a different emotion at times when you're not angry, you'll have a better chance of managing your anger in those hot-button moments

most (all?) of the senior engineers I know take on a significant amount of helping-other-people work in addition to their individual programming work. The challenge I see me/my coworkers struggling with today isn’t so much “what?? I have to TALK TO PEOPLE?? UNBELIEVABLE.” and more “wait, how do I balance all of this leadership work with my individual contributions / programming work in a way that’s sustainable for me? How much of what kind of work should I be doing?“

most (all?) of the senior engineers I know take on a significant amount of helping-other-people work in addition to their individual programming work. The challenge I see me/my coworkers struggling with today isn’t so much “what?? I have to TALK TO PEOPLE?? UNBELIEVABLE.” and more “wait, how do I balance all of this leadership work with my individual contributions / programming work in a way that’s sustainable for me? How much of what kind of work should I be doing?“

Exponent brings together the best of web (development speed, fast iteration cycles, easy deploys, automatic cross-platform support, and simple sharing with URLs) and the performance and user experience of native apps.

Exponent brings together the best of web (development speed, fast iteration cycles, easy deploys, automatic cross-platform support, and simple sharing with URLs) and the performance and user experience of native apps.

Extension Auto-Installer is a helper for Firefox/SeaMonkey/Thunderbird extension developers: it allows automatically adding or updating browser extensions, e.g. via command line tools. This makes testing your changes easier.

Extension Auto-Installer is a helper for Firefox/SeaMonkey/Thunderbird extension developers: it allows automatically adding or updating browser extensions, e.g. via command line tools. This makes testing your changes easier.

Dropbox Sync is a Heroku beta feature that lets you deploy the contents of Dropbox folders to Heroku apps after linking your Dropbox and Heroku accounts.

I don't like writing negative articles that don't include a solution to the problem, but in this case, there is no solution. The state of in-app purchases has now reached a level where we have completely lost it. Not only has the gaming industry shot itself in the foot, hacked off their other foot, and lost both its arms ... but it's still engaging in a strategy that will only damage it further.

I don't like writing negative articles that don't include a solution to the problem, but in this case, there is no solution. The state of in-app purchases has now reached a level where we have completely lost it. Not only has the gaming industry shot itself in the foot, hacked off their other foot, and lost both its arms ... but it's still engaging in a strategy that will only damage it further.

In this tutorial, I’ll show you how Crafty makes it easy to make simple, 2D games and I’ll walk you through the process of making a very simple game from start to finish. By the end of the tutorial, you’ll know how to start making your own games from scratch using Crafty and you’ll have our example game built and running in your own development environment which will give you a great jumping-off point for future projects.

In this tutorial, I’ll show you how Crafty makes it easy to make simple, 2D games and I’ll walk you through the process of making a very simple game from start to finish. By the end of the tutorial, you’ll know how to start making your own games from scratch using Crafty and you’ll have our example game built and running in your own development environment which will give you a great jumping-off point for future projects.

Ravello enables you to overcome your internal resource constraints and use the public cloud to develop and test your applications. Supercharge your development process!

Ravello enables you to overcome your internal resource constraints and use the public cloud to develop and test your applications. Supercharge your development process!

a side-by-side reference sheet

The transformative power of "source always included" in JavaScript is a major reason why I coined – and continue to believe in – Atwood's Law. Even if "view source" isn't built in (but it totally should be), you should demand access to the underlying source code for your stack. No matter what the documentation says, the source code is the ultimate truth, the best and most definitive and up-to-date documentation you're likely to find. This will be true forever, so the sooner you come to terms with this, the better off you'll be as a software developer.

The problem is that this person’s problem-solving technique is to ask for the solution. Not to seek advice on how to approach the task, or ask for the names of likely classes to look into, or a link to an example - but to just ask for the code, fully formed and ready to go. This is not problem solving, and software engineering is entirely about problem solving.

The problem is that this person’s problem-solving technique is to ask for the solution. Not to seek advice on how to approach the task, or ask for the names of likely classes to look into, or a link to an example - but to just ask for the code, fully formed and ready to go. This is not problem solving, and software engineering is entirely about problem solving.

Push notifications are a way for websites to send small messages to users when the user is not on the site. iOS and Android devices already support their own push notification services, but we want to make notifications available to the whole web. We’re making prototypes and designing the API right now and want to share our progress.

"I started thinking about programmer performance a while ago. Everybody will tell you that you can’t measure programmer productivity, but this is at best a half-truth. We can, and we should. Perhaps what we shouldn’t do is use those measurements to compare programmers to each other, but we can definitely measure ourselves."

This scratchbox setup got me compiling things for the chumby

"Lemmings started life as a simple animation back in August 1989 when DMA Design had just moved into their first office (which only consited of 2 small rooms), and were begining a new game called Walker (based on the walker that was used in Blood Money)."

"Agile" is kind of a dirty word in some circles, but this describe some actually agile ways to deal with revision control using git. "When we started using git to manage our source code at work, we actually jumped in a little bit too fast. It seems like there is a lot of writing about how you can do lots of really neat things with git, but no real guide about one particular way of using git for your project. This post is going to describe how we use git day to day on a reasonably large “agile-style” project."

"iProcessing is an open programming framework to help people develop native iPhone applications using the Processing language. It is an integration of the Processing.js library and a Javascript application framework for iPhone. The iProcessing download consists of a set of example XCode projects that demonstrate many of the Basic Examples from the Processing web site (originally written by Casey Reas and Ben Fry unless otherwise stated) as well a number that demonstrate the use of various iPhone features such as multitouch, accelerometer, orientation, location, sound play/record, app state saving and so on"

"In this post I present the development model that I’ve introduced for all of my projects (both at work and private) about a year ago, and which has turned out to be very successful. I’ve been meaning to write about it for a while now, but I’ve never really found the time to do so thoroughly, until now. I won’t talk about any of the projects’ details, merely about the branching strategy and release management."

"I propose a simple set of rules and requirements that dictate how version numbers are assigned and incremented. For this system to work, you first need to declare a public API. This may consist of documentation or be enforced by the code itself. Regardless, it is important that this API be clear and precise. Once you identify your public API, you communicate changes to it with specific increments to your version number. Consider a version format of X.Y.Z (Major.Minor.Patch). Bug fixes not affecting the API increment the patch version, backwards compatible API additions/changes increment the minor version, and backwards incompatible API changes increment the major version."

"Git and Subversion can work together in many ways. Previously, we showed how Git users can work with a project primarily managed by Subversion. In this post, we describe one way to handle the converse: Google Code acts as a stable read-only Subversion mirror of a Git project. In this model, patches are first applied to the central Git repository and exported to Google Code later."

"The heart of Ares is its visual drag-and-drop interface builder. The interface builder makes it simple to build complex layouts that adapt to orientation changes and support multiple webOS devices. The visual debugger in Ares goes far beyond the debugging tools previously available to webOS developers, and Ares’ code editor (based on the pioneering work of Mozilla’s Bespin delivers a great experience. Even in beta, we think you’ll find Ares to be the most complete and efficient environment for building webOS apps."

"M3InstallController is a class that will warn users if they are running your application from a disk image and offer to install the application in their Applications folder."

"The problem is that this person’s problem-solving technique is to ask for the solution. Not to seek advice on how to approach the task, or ask for the names of likely classes to look into, or a link to an example – but to just ask for the code, fully formed and ready to go. This is not problem solving, and software engineering is entirely about problem solving."

"Note that the knowledge for each level is cumulative; being at level n implies that you also know everything from the levels lower than n. "

"Software should be designed, written, and deployed in small batches.Small batches mean faster feedback. Small batches mean problems are instantly localized. Small batches reduce risk. Small batches reduce overhead. "

"This site is here because I seem to be spending a lot of time lately defending Gitsters against charges of fanboyism, bandwagonism and koolaid-thirst. So, here is why people are switching to Git from X, and why you should too. Just click on a reason to view it. "

"On the SVN server the first thing we did was to create a special Verbatim user that can commit to SVN via SSH using a generated key. We copied this key to the Verbatim host which allowed us to commit as the verbatim user without typing a username or password.The only thing that was added to the Verbatim code was a patch that Dan Schafer cooked up that sets an SVN revision property, translate:author, to the name of the current user. When the user clicks “commit” this property is set and sent along with the commit.Next we added a post-commit script that looks for the translate:author property. If it’s found it will take that value, replace svn:author, and remove translate:author; effectively making whatever was in translate:author the real author. This is a non-versioned change which means there is no commit that needs to happen - the new author is set immediately."

"Paver is a Python-based build/distribution/deployment scripting tool along the lines of Make or Rake. What makes Paver unique is its integration with commonly used Python libraries. Common tasks that were easy before remain easy. More importantly, dealing with your applications specific needs and requirements is now much easier."

"Instead what happens when software developers try the Hollywood Launch, and I've seen this many times, is that users indeed do flood to your site on launch day but... Tomorrow, hardly any of those users come back. Your traffic graphs look like the sharpest mountain you've ever seen: a huge climb up and then, almost immediately, a similarly-sized crash back down. ... So what do you do then? Well, you do what you should have done all along: you grow the site."

"But by making it a Big Bang release, you’ve maximized the chances that you’ll be behind schedule when you get to the end ... Imagine going to the hospital for a kidney transplant, and before and during the surgery saying to the surgeon: “Oh, and while you’re already in there digging around, I’ve had some problems with my lungs ... In many cases, these Big Rewrite projects have resulted in unhappy customers, political battles, missed deadlines, and sometimes complete failure to deliver. In all cases, the projects were considerably harder than the projects’ initiators ever thought they would be. ... While we’re all in the back creating the next revision of a product, who’s tending to the day to day issues of the existing product? Typically, it’s the domain experts and the original implementers of the product."

"It takes someone who really knows the guts of what you are doing to appreciate a black triangle. "

"What if we used ODF compatible tools like OpenOffice to write our programs?"

"So, I say "embrace 1.0!" And then get back to work, because 1.0 is just the beginning."