Open Kosmaczewski

There are basically two things you can do to earn a living when you write code: Consulting Products When doing consulting, you write code, and somebody else owns it; you are blamed for its bugs, rarely praised for its benefits, and usually you only sell one copy of your work. When working on products, you [...]

Historically, we can distinguish really big software companies for providing, at least, four major kinds of products: an operating system (sometimes open sourced at a certain level), a web browser (with various degrees of standard compliance), a suite of office applications (slightly compatible with everyone else’s), and a programming language with curly brackets (generally incompatible [...]

This paper will highlight the results of an extensive research conducted since the mid 90′s, on the effects of the consumption of beverages based in the plant known as Ilex paraguariensis, in the framework of software development process activities in South America and some small parts of Europe. This paper will provide an introduction to [...]

A lot has been said and done about the iPhone, but there’s much more to Cocoa and Objective-C than our beloved pocket device. During a chat session with Stefan Fürst from Media Atelier we put together a quick list of significant Mac applications created in Switzerland (and southern Germany), and indeed the list (in no [...]

Notitas is available at an App Store near you! Notitas means “small notes” in Spanish, and it’s the fourth iPhone application under the akosma brand, and the first based on an original idea of my dear wife! As the name implies, it’s a simple and easy way to create, keep and find notes in your [...]

Let me introduce to you RooiFonts and DeviceDNA, the latest iPhone apps by akosma software on the App Store! RooiFonts is an evolution of my previous Font Browser application (still open source, still in Github). RooiFonts builds upon that application bringing some more new features, like the ability to send a screenshot of a sample [...]

As an iPhone developer, one of the simplest and easiest mechanisms you have to interact with other applications is through the use of iPhone URL Schemes. These are so important that I’ve created a wiki page where I keep track of those I come across, including code samples that help me exchange data with them. [...]

A Cooperative Organization: (…) Gore has been a team-based, flat lattice organization that fosters personal initiative. There are no traditional organizational charts, no chains of command, nor predetermined channels of communication. Instead, we communicate directly with each other and are accountable to fellow members of our multi-disciplined teams. We encourage hands-on innovation, involving those closest [...]

In 2006 I had the opportunity to work as a “project leader” into a small failing project. Three developers were working in an ad hoc basis, creating a software application for an important client (a government office in Lausanne), without any kind of detailed formal specification, without any kind of design documentation, and with strong [...]

Published in 1975, “The Mythical Man-Month” is considered an all-time classic in the software engineering field. The book author, Frederick P. Brooks Jr., used his experience as the project manager of the IBM System/360 and its software, the Operating System/360, to explain a common set of problem patterns, applicable to other software projects as well. [...]