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 [...]

This is something I should have done much earlier, but hey, better late than never: akosma software has a new website and I’m happy to invite you to take a look at it. Open Kosmaczewski will slowly become a more personal platform, as most of my future iPhone-related material will appear in the new akosma [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Last year I blogged about the upcoming SDK 2.0 for the iPhone 3G, and boy did it change my life. For those who haven’t followed closely everything that happened in this blog lately, there’s been this (that’s me in the WWDC keynote main room at the Moscone center) and then that (yours truly talking at [...]

Those of you who have been following this blog for the past years know that I have somewhat reduced my “writing rhythm” these days, and many factors have caused this. For the past 3 months I’ve been not only finishing my Master’s degree, but I started working as a full-time, independent iPhone developer, and soon [...]

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 have several mantras in my life. One of them is to learn a new programming language every year. Another one is to read at least 6 technology-related books every year. I’ve already talked about Erlang (and boy that was the most read article ever in the whole life of this blog! More than 1600 [...]

Startups and The Problem Of Premature Scalaculation One of the reasons why startup founders so often spend too much too soon on scalability is that it is satisfying to do so. You can spend resources and have something to show for it. It is also easier to take credit for tangible progress. “Hey, we just [...]