Graham Lee’s “Why is programming so hard?” made me think about how I started programming and whether I’d be coding now if I was twelve.
When I began, I had a Sinclair Spectrum. Back then, home computers booted into a programming language (BASIC typically) and to do anything you needed to know at least one command. To be fair, even then many people didn’t get beyond J, Symbol Shift-P, Symbol Shift-P (‘LOAD “”‘, the command used to load a program from tape).
Over the years I’ve been asked to do a lot of programming aptitude tests. I’ve had to do some in the last couple of months and I’m deliberately writing this now before I get the results back of the most recent one so you won’t think that this post is just sour grapes…
I’m not going to get into the details of the tests because it doesn’t really matter what they are or who administered them for the purposes of this post.
I’m seeing a surprising amount of vitriol aimed at Swift, Apple’s new programming language for iOS and Mac development. I understand that there can be reasoned debate around the features (or lack thereof), syntax and even the necessity of it but there can be little doubt about the outcome: if you want to consider yourself an iOS developer, it’s a language that you will need to learn.
The only variable I can think of is when you learn it.
My first project out of university was a disaster.
The client was unhappy, technically it was a mess, no one knew what it was supposed to do despite the volume of requirements and functional specification documents and the quality of what was there was terrible. People were working hard but it wasn’t really going anywhere.
All of this, I should note, was happening before I joined. I didn’t realise how bad it really was at the time. The Real World was so different and new from university that I was blinded the problems and just did what I thought was best.
I’m not entirely sure what I was thinking. In about 2005 I bought an iSight, Apple’s relatively short-lived external webcam. It was a beautiful device. Sleek, easy to use and functional.
At least, I think it was functional.
For a device that cost me well over £100 I didn’t really think it through. No one else I knew at the time had a Mac with iChat. Or a webcam.
Before I finally gave in and sold it on eBay I did use it a few times with my then girlfriend (now wife). And it was really nice; like the future. Having grown up with old, slow computers the idea of playing video on them is still slightly magical to me. To have a computer simultaneously record, compress, transmit, receive, decode and display high resolution videos still strikes me as pretty amazing.
The flood of new so-called smart watches continues. Some people seem to love theirs, others remain to be convinced.
Count me in with the unconvinced, though only because the current ones seem to be poorly conceived.
Portability is critical to modern device usefulness, and there are only two classes that matter anymore: always with you, and not… Smartphones dominate always with you.
I think this gets to the heart of why the current range of devices — both those for sale and also those just announced at CES — just are not very compelling.
As happy as I am with the way that my new app, CameraGPS, a GPS logger application for people who want to geotag their photographs, came out I can’t say that it’s exactly as I envisioned it at the start of the process.
The idea was something like this: many of the GPS logger apps in the App Store require you to either use iTunes file sharing (who connects their iPhone’s to iTunes any more?) or mail yourself the exported document or sign up to some third party fitness or trekking website. Mailing yourself stuff just didn’t feel very slick and I didn’t want to record my trails for fitness purposes.
I was recently asked to recommend a tablet. I thought my reply might be generally useful, so below is a lightly edited version of what I wrote.
The machine I’d recommend depends. It depends mostly on how much you want to pay and what it might used for. The good news is that, by and large, you get what you pay for. (Corollary: don’t get any of the really cheap ones. Argos, for example, do a really cheap one. Avoid it.)
I’ve been using iOS 7 for a while now — for a couple of months on my iPad and about half that on my iPhone — so thought it was worth a quick summary of my experience. I’m certainly not going into the depth that Arstechnica have; I’ll do it all in a few bullet points.
The good
The bad
There have been a few blogs recently about people finding their true vocation and discovering that it’s not developing software. This is not a “me too” post. I do still develop software for a living and I don’t intend becoming a writer or anything else any time soon. But like most people (I assume) my career has taken turns that I never would have imagined when I started out.
In fact when I was at school I took quite some time trying very hard not to be a software developer for a living. I took geography rather than the rather more obvious (if you know me) chemistry because I wanted to be a pilot. I was so determined to keep programming computers as a hobby that I almost took woodwork instead of computer studies when I was fourteen.