Tag: systems-thinking

Inspecting Network Traffic on Ubuntu Linux

Inspecting network traffic is a pain. Here are a collection of (built-in) tools and techniques for seeing what's going on under the hood in Ubuntu Linux.

Some Thoughts Inspired by Nintendo's Hybrid Device, the Switch

Nintendo's hybrid device, the Switch has been hugely popular. What does this tell us about the future of hybrid devices in general?

The Ambulance Down in the Valley

A while back, I was discussing some of the nonsensical actions that people take in the software industry with my parents during a visit. my mom told me to look up a poem called The Ambulance Down in the Valley. I wrote it down and forgot about it for months because I was in the middle of the last semester of my Master’s degree. I finally got a chance to look it up, and it really is a beautiful illustration of the strange way we look to solve problems sometimes.

The Danger of Building a Product on Someone Else's Service

Why I Would Not Get a Facebook Phone

Why "Bug Free" is Impossible

One of the most common misconceptions about software testing is that, once a program or software system has gone through testing, it is free of bugs. If you accept this assumption, it logically follows that, if any bugs are found by the end user, the software was not properly tested. Both of these statements are absolutely false.

iOS's App Store Comes to the Mac, More to Follow?

The interface that Apple provides to its users on the iPhone and iPad for downloading third party applications has been wildly successful, and now that same experience is coming to the Mac. The creation of iPhone OS (now iOS) when the first iPhone was released forced Apple to rethink many things about a device’s operating system and the way in which the user interacts with it. No doubt, many valuable lessons were learned and it’s impossible that the iPhone and iPad would be so popular if that weren’t the case. I believe extending the App Store to the Mac is, for Apple, a step towards bringing those lessons to OS X.

Apple Renames iPhone OS to iOS

At his WWDC Keynote speech today, one of the things that Steve Jobs revealed is that version 4 of iPhone OS will be bringing with it an entirely new name: iOS. This seems to be a completely logical change considering how little sense it makes to continue to run the “iPhone” OS on an iPad. At the same time, I think this hints at bigger things to come. I think Jobs may well envision iOS as a full operating system that may one day stand shoulder to shoulder with OS X, at least for casual computer users.

Analogies as Abstractions

Analogies are an effective way of communicating knowledge of one domain by mapping the domain’s concepts to another similar domain that is known by that person. In this way, a person can gain understanding of domain B through their existing knowledge of domain A.

Abstraction in Software Architecture

One of the important parts of the essence of software architecture is that it is an abstraction of the actual code of the software system. What’s interesting about that is that it means software architecture is an abstraction of an abstraction, since the code we write using modern programming languages is just an abstraction on top of machine code. Just how many layers of abstraction have we accrued over the years that Software Engineering has been growing up?