Blindsided by Bitcode. Another Apple bug tale, this one almost un-testable, and a bit of a lesson on privacy. — Apple in December 2021 broke apps on phones running iOS earlier than the current version 15. This affected developers all around the world, including Touchgram. Anyone releasing an app update from early December onwards was likely to be vulnerable. The bug was sneaky and impossible to pick up until an…

Programming and debugging life — what a really hard bug looks like being found & fixed. A tale for startup founders, developers and the curious. — This is what despair looks like. This is a tale for programmers or anyone interested in what it’s like for us debugging things. If you’re in a relationship with a developer and wonder why sometimes they can be incredibly wrong about how long things take, this may help you understand.

I'm a longstanding dev and also have a keen interest in housing. I've designed a passive solar house & known a lot of builders. The idea that architects specify things to the millimetre and implement from a finished, grand design will have the average builder rolling with laughter. Yes, sometimes some elements are specified that closely. A surprising/terrifying amount is worked out on the job, between different levels of the building professionals.

I’m sitting for the last night with our dog, for the gentle needle comes tomorrow.

Why the next version of Touchgram teaches you how to use it, with a bunch of Touchgrams. — “Why Dogfooding?” There is an old tradition in product development that supposedly dates back to real dogfood manufacturers — if the members of the board couldn’t stand the taste of the dogfood then it wasn’t fit for dogs either. “Yeah but what does that have to do with Touchgram?” Touchgram…

(re-read for the umpteenth comforting time) — Poesy words arrive in my whisky’d dog-woken brain, like ant-trails of rain on drought-set clay. Blinkingly real, tears of electric, distant storms. Zelazny wrote, of moth-made, Vorpal sword, lines to end all…

The summary of how Touchgram is developed is simple: Write playable experiences (like a games programmer) Add encoding of supporting data Add a user interface I’m posting this explanation because it’s something that gets referred to often in conversation in person and online. In more detail, it goes like this…

A technical and cautionary tale for startups This is mostly about engineering decisions and an overall look at how Touchgram works under the hood. If you’re a startup founder or engineering manager, you may find it schadenfreude-ingly entertaining or instructive. There’s been a long year of work on the core…

A debugging tale of blind alleys, despair, and the power of stubbornly just keeping playing with something until you notice a vital clue. — Touchgram got stalled for an embarrassing, almost three full months, in 2020. With one bug. I’ve been a developer for nearly 40 years and seen some horrible code. I’ve even written some of it. As I’ve tweeted recently, I don’t tend to write simple bugs any more. …