Open Kosmaczewski

Xcode does not impose any structure to your source code tree. This is both cool and useful to quickly throw a couple of lines for a prototype, but in my experience, this approach does not scale. More often than not, without any hygiene, your project can become a mess. Just using Xcode defaults, after a [...]

You might remember my beloved mantras: learning a new programming language and reading at least 6 relevant books every year. Following the 2007 edition, here’s the list of the 8 books I have enjoyed most in 2008, ordered by a purely subjective and absolutely irrational decreasing preference. I strongly recommend all of them! Winner: Geekonomics: [...]

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. [...]

While several other professions have a long, established and standard procedure of certification, the title “software engineer” is applied to both self-made developers, turned into experts of some technique, or to people with PhD degrees, and a long history of both academic and professional achievements. When in some situations it is not legally possible to [...]

Software Engineering is the youngest of all the professions, being born around 50 years ago, but since then it has been continually improved. Practicers have fiercely debated upon it through the years, given the extremely fast pace of the innovations in the field, and the extremely difficult and inherently dynamic nature of software. Many trends [...]

I’ve just had a very interesting conversation with my colleague Marco about different approaches to the organization of code inside a Django application. As you might know (and if you don’t I’ll tell you anyway), Django’s views (somehow occupying the “Controller” level in an MVC architecture) must take (at least) an HttpRequest instance as a parameter and [...]

Introduction Charles Petzold, in its book “Code”, states the following: In theory, application programs are supposed to access the hardware of the computer only through the interfaces provided by the operating system. But many application programmers who dealt with small computer operating systems of the 1970s and early 1980s often bypassed the operating system, particularly [...]

Next week I will be in Belgium working with the Thales team in Brussels, building a new software solution (for a customer of the public sector that I cannot disclose here) using the following technologies: Spring Framework for .NET NHibernate Personally, this seems like a rather new (Microsoft-less) way of doing a .NET application, and [...]

Hier j’ai eu l’opportunité de donner un cours sur Architecture de Software à mes collègues de Thales. Pour ceux qui le souhaiteraient, j’ai joint à ce message le fichier PowerPoint que j’ai preparé pour l’occasion. N’hésitez pas a me faire part de vos remarques et commentaires!