What Your App's Crash Rate Can Tell You When I shipped my first app 30 years ago, once we put it on a floppy and in the box and sent it away we had basically no idea what the ultimate customer experienced—unless they called us. Today the options for knowing what the end user is experiencing for
Shipping In every project there comes an important time every one of us gets to, assuming it's not cancelled: Shipping. Somehow all the work you've slaved over has to be deployed to production, rolled out to customers, pushed to an App Store, or like I did 30 years ago, baked into
The Biggest Difference Between Coding Today and When I Started in the 80’s I’m a lot older. But seriously, the biggest skill back then was invention, creativity, imagination, whatever you would like to call it; unlike today there was no Google, no Stackoverflow, no open source at your fingertips, rarely even someone to email to ask for help. You were basically programming
The Six Goals Of Every Programming Project When I shipped my first app in 1987, Trapeze, I had no idea how many more things I would be shipping over the next 30 years. In all that time I have been working to reach the same end goals for each project release. None of these have changed from
Strive For Simple In Everything Having shipped software for more than 30 years now, in many different environments and industries and forms, the one thing I’ve found that distinguishes the best projects from the not so good ones is Simple. Simple is not simplistic, it isn’t quick and dirty, it isn’t lazy,
How Might the Internet Change Without Net Neutrality? Now that the new administration is in, it’s strange to me that no one is thinking about what might happen to the internet given the desire to kill net neutrality in the U.S. For those not knowledgeable of what net neutrality means, it basically means you can connect
25 Ways To Make Your Software Development More Awesomely Crappy! 1. Make everything as complicated as possible, if not more so 2. Call everything Agile, especially the stuff that isn’t 3. Plan everything in advance; make sure you get sign-offs from every layer of management, accept random deadlines, calculate the whole project’s story points long before you start
The Story of My First Startup 30 Years Ago This is a story of my first startup from 1985-1988; some of this will seem so familiar to people who have started companies today and some will seem completely alien as the world was much different back then. People haven’t changed much but technology, knowledge, the market and opportunities
I Miss Being Part Of A Complete Team I work for Ginormous Corp, Massive Division, as part of a high profile project, doing the part of it everyone is watching. Yet we are dependent on a dozen teams, spread out over the whole division, with an insane amount of dependencies, meetings, processes, systems and modules. Constant changes coming
Lessons Learned Shipping Apps I shipped my first app Trapeze to real paying customers in January of 1987. Yes, that’s thirty years ago. Man am I old. Over the years I’ve worked on and shipped a lot of apps, and delivered app like projects. Although every industry and type of app may
Phone Interviews Can Be So Painful To Do I haven’t written much here lately due to the crazy workload at my job. Working for a big company can be really complicated and this project is the second highest profile thing we are doing this year. But being the lead iOS person I have to interview folks for
How Many People Does It Take To Ship Software? There are a million jokes along the line of “How many _____ does it take to screw in a lightbulb?” Sometimes I laugh at work at how many people are involved in the project I am working on. We have me and one other programmer and 20-30 other people that we
My Biggest Regret As A Programmer A little over 20 years ago I was at a crossroads. My second company was petering out when our 5 years of building Deltagraph for the publisher ended (they wanted to move into the nascent internet space). At that point I had 13 years experience as a programmer but also
The Myth Of Reusability The story always begins with a complaint. Executives complain that software is taking too long and costing too much to build. Some bright person suggests that money could be saved if software were built to be reusable, thus allowing slightly more expense to result in components that could be leveraged
All Code Is Fleeting, Don’t Act Like It’s Forever Of all the things I have written in my 34 years of being a programmer, the code I have written that I know is still in use is very limited. Prior to my previous job the only app I know still exists is Deltagraph, which for some reason is still
Programming Is Not A Dying Profession While reading the post Coding Academies Are Nonsense I came across the statement that coding academies aren’t worth any investment because it’s a dying profession. The author goes on to say “I see coding shrinking as a widespread profession. Not because software is going away, but because the
Software Estimation Is A Crock After 34 years of being a programmer I still get a kick out of people thinking there is a magical way to make software estimation work. All during my career I’ve heard person after person declare estimation is broken but that they have some way to make it work
I Remember the Day The Internet Started But I Fear For the Future Twenty years ago this week Netscape went public. I've always thought of this as the day the internet really started. I was contracting at a company nearby that had also recently gone public (before I got there) and I remember we watched the IPO looking at a page Netscape had
How Many Programming Technologies Can You Really Master? I keep seeing companies or their recruiters advertising they are looking for people "with significant experience developing iOS and Android applications from scratch and will have a mastery of modern mobile and web technologies, including Java, HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, JSON and AJAX". There is no such person. You can master
The Most agile Project I Ever Did When people think of Agile they usually think of a specific process like Scrum or Kanban. This story is more about dealing with continuous change, driven by the CEO, in what seemed insane at the start but actually ended up being a lot of fun. Yes fun. This was three
Why Do People Still Not Expect The Spanish Inquisition? Not a day goes by that there isn’t a new story about companies or agencies getting hacked and user data exposed. Yet every one I read about is the same, they failed to properly protect their databases and systems and someone leaked or stole or exposed valuable data. It’
After 3 Decades In Programming, Looking At the Next 3 Decades If you had a time machine and went back from today to my first day of work as a programmer in October, 1981, and told me what I would be doing today and what things would be like in the programming world I wouldn’t have believed you. Predicting what
Before You Fix The Bug Make Sure You Understand It Exactly I am supporting the company I worked for until recently part time until they get someone else (I am taking time to work on my house) and today the server guy reported that the beta iOS app (which I support, there is also an older production version) generated a duplicate
Down With Downvoting There are a lot of sites on the internet where people can post links to things or questions or even make statements. Generally people are allowed to vote in different ways to create a ranking of interest. There are a number of alternate systems for identifying reader interest. Reddit and
How I’ve Avoided Burnout During More Than 3 Decades As A Programmer After reading a couple of posts about programmer burnout today I started to think about how I’ve kept interested even after working in such a long career (since 1981). Why do I still care to write code? Of course I covered some of this in my popular post Yes
