There were MP3 players, and then there was the iPod. There were cell phones, and then there was the iPhone. There were tablet PCs, and then there was the iPad. The Apple Watch, arriving later this month, has some pretty tough acts to follow. At the risk of sounding like a copywriter, Apple’s consumer products … continue reading
Although the point of this column is to discuss “where the rubber meets the road” of software development rather than theory, if you read SD Times, you are most likely managing a software development team or teams. As endlessly challenging as code is, dealing with people is, by far, the harder part of developing software … continue reading
“Maybe instead of talking about 100x programmers, we should talk about 100x programming.” This was a recent Twitter provocation from Reginald Braithwaite (@RaganWald), author of “JavaScript Allongé.” What would it take to achieve a two-order-of-magnitude change in software development pace? The boldness of the target dwarfs the common quibbles about syntax, semantics, and maybe even … continue reading
For all its surface frenzy, 2014 was a year in which the biggest news stories in the programming language community were about acknowledging reality and bowing to the inevitable. First, there was Java 8. For Java developers, this release is the most important since before the turn of the century—probably the most important release since … continue reading
A few months ago, I pondered the growing gap between the way we solve problems in our day-to-day programming and the way problems are being solved by new techniques involving Big Data and statistical machine-learning techniques. The ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge has seen a leap in performance with the widespread adoption of convolutional … continue reading
Functional programming is bigger than ever. Between Apple’s new Swift programming language, the availability of F# and Scala on the CLR and JVM respectively, and even the introduction of lambdas to Java, mainstream programmers are increasingly expected to be comfortable not just with object-oriented terminology, but with the jargon and mindset of the functional community. … continue reading
The presentation of iOS 8 was dominated by Apple’s Near Field Communication (NFC) payment technology and the Apple Watch, but from a developer’s perspective, the most amazing thing about iOS 8 is its sheer size. When I started developing mobile applications just a few years ago, one of the things I liked about iOS was … continue reading
If there is one thing that analytics reveal about technical writing, it’s that developers want code, not concepts. Programmers have a problem, and they want the solution to that problem now, not below the fold after a multi-thousand-word discourse. (Umm… The answer to this column is C = 5/9 * (F – 32).) When it … continue reading
It seems clear that we’re living in a golden age of capabilities. Satya Nadella’s “Bold Ambition and Our Core” memo boasts that “the Cortana app on my Windows Phone merges data from highway sensors and my own calendar and simply reminds me to leave work to make it to my daughter’s recital on time.” Siri, … continue reading
