Andrew Wulf

Lessons From A Lifetime Of Being A Programmer

Over my 3 decades of being a programmer, I have learned a few things. Here are a few goodies. I bet I can make more. * Customers only know what they want after they see it. I learned this in my first job. Customers won't realize what is actually

The Fine Art Of Solving Strange Bugs

Solving strange, unexplainable and downright bizarre errors in production apps or code is something every programmer has to do sometimes. It's often much like Dr. House trying to figure out what's wrong with a patient with missing or conflicting symptoms. It's also one of

I'm Sick Of GOF Design Patterns

In the famous 1994 book "Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software" the authors covered a number of classic object-oriented design patterns in addition to covering some basic design concepts. It's a nice book in some ways. But what people have done with it is beyond

The Lesson My Dad Taught Me That Directly Influenced My Success As A Programmer

A couple of years before he passed away at an age only a few year older than I am now, my Dad and I went for a long walk where he told me that in anything I do, I should do it Zack Zack. This slang he learned when he

Everything Is Insecure

In security the zeroth rule is "your security will fail eventually." What gets me angry is when people ignore this rule and claim otherwise. Doing security right is very difficult. Yet even the most knowledgeable, paranoid, genius security expert knows that they only need to make one mistake,

The Pain and Gain of Being Laid Off

Stories now making the rounds that Microsoft will lay off up to 15% of its workforce in the coming year made me think about my own experiences. There is both great pain and great opportunity in being on the receiving end which is not always obvious when the boot hits

Monitor Or Fail

Soon after I started in my present/soon to be former job in our mobile team, the product manager suddenly discovered one of our lines of business had had no sales in the past month. Of course "sudden" and "the past month" sound like an oxymoron.

Frameworks and Frankenstein

In the famous novel Dr. Frankenstein built his monster out of many parts from dead people. Initially he wanted to create a beautiful creature but the difficulties of reanimating and combining the parts made him create a hideous monster instead. When you approach building an application, one of the earliest

Where Will The Next Generation Of Programmers Come From?

After reading the post Kids Can't Use Computers... And This Is Why It Should Worry You again which had a big run on Reddit recently, I couldn't help but wonder where the next generation of programmers will come from? As I've related in the

Programming Is a Dead End Job

Do you love to program? Don't expect to ever become CEO unless you start your own company - but even then the needs of leadership will likely result in not writing any more code. In most jobs as long as you continue to write code you will likely

What Writing - And Selling - Software Was Like In The 80's

I started my career in 1981 working for 3 years at a defense contractor. By 1985 I started my first company to develop and then sell a spreadsheet like application for the Mac called Trapeze. It shipped in January 1987 but by the end of the year we sold it

The Education of a Programmer

No, I'm not going to talk about learning to code. I've always wondered what in my past made me not only want to become a programmer, but led me to the particular skill set I have worked with for the past 3 decades. This post is

Security Is Job 12

Today we read that Target had actually installed some sophisticated security software and both it and their desktop antivirus reported seeing something wrong while the famous hack was happening. Apparently they ignored the warnings and brushed off any idea of investigating. It doesn't surprise me much, almost everywhere

How Much Is That Seat By The Window; How Flight Reservations Work #2

In my first post about flights I covered a lot of the terms and participants in making a flight reservation. This post will answer as best I can the more interesting bits. This is a really, really long post. You need a beverage and some peanuts. I think there will

Our iOS App Crash Rate

Our flagship iOS app crashes occasionally. We use Crashlytics to track crashes and Google Analytics to track usage which is a fairly common combination. I look at the crash reports every day just to see if anything unusual happens and maybe find something I can fix. Although I never identify

Your Progress As A Programmer Is All Up To You

I read a comment on a post on Hacker News where a young programmer said they didn't want to work at a place where older obsolete programmers were let go instead of being retrained, as they would be there some day. This person meant well, but still managed

How I Wound Up As An Early Mac Pioneer And Built Something Crazy

Thirty years ago I was working at a defense contractor as one of the few people they had working with microcomputers. I had a Lisa on my desk briefly (an evaluation unit) and got familiar with windows and mice. Once the Mac was revealed we didn't have one

The Future Is Hard To See

When I started my first programming job in 1981 I didn't really think much about the future. Though I bought an Apple II+ back in 1979 and had a friend who worked on the original TRS-80, both of which represented a whole new world in programming, it didn&

Good Idea, Wrong Time

I've been debating for years to even write this post. It's about the dumbest, most idiotic thing I ever did. Or rather, the one I didn't finish. In 1996 ICQ appeared as the first real mass market text based instant messaging application. Soon thereafter

Failure Is The Engine That Drives The Future

Read a note today by someone on Hacker News who lamented his failure in starting a company and the ever growing disaster it was causing made me think. We all were all failures once; everything sucked at some point. The thing is, if you never failed you probably never risked

You're Doing It Wrong!

If you are building a bridge you can't ignore gravity, the design has to hold up the load. If you are making a Souffle, you need to follow the instructions precisely to make it come out right. If you are writing software however there isn't a

94% Of Projects Fail, Or Maybe 59%

Search on Google for 94% of projects fail. You'll find something like 26 million results. I can also guarantee that 77% of you won't try. Or maybe it's 35%; I forget which. The point is that we are constantly badgered by precise percentages that

Engineering Truth: How the Internet Pumps Up The Lies

When the internet and especially the web first became a part of everyone's life many of us thought "finally, the truth can always be found". We were terribly wrong. It turns out the internet is a fine medium for pumping out volumes of misleading, incorrect, dangerous

What Is Software Quality?

Quality is one of those things that everyone wants at the end of a software project but rarely does anyone have a good idea of what it is. Like so many things in the software world it's hard to define or even get people to agree on what

40 Years Ago This Month I Wrote My First Line Of Code

Hard to believe I've been doing this for 4 decades and not only can still be successful at it but still enjoy it. I was 15-going-on-16 starting as a junior in high school. A teacher had decided that the school needed to offer a computer class and found