"Expanded View of Mobile Development and Data" entries

Open source won, so what’s next?

What to expect at OSCON 2015.

OSCON 2014 show floor

Twenty years ago, open source was a cause. Ten years ago, it was the underdog. Today, it sits upon the Iron Throne ruling all it surveys. Software engineers now use open source frameworks, languages, and tools in almost all projects.

When I was putting together the program for OSCON with the other program chairs, it occurred to me that by covering “just” open source, we weren’t really leaving out all that much of the software landscape. It seems open source has indeed won, but let’s not gloat; let’s make things even better. Open source has made many great changes to software possible, but the spirit of the founding community goes well beyond code. Read more…

Swift-like Swift code

A brief introduction to Swift optionals.

swift_swarm

Swift is becoming the language of choice for more and more developers on iOS and OS X. It’s fast, simple, clean, and has a number of features that simply aren’t available to Objective-C programmers.

While it isn’t a hard requirement to do so, several projects are being ported from Objective-C to Swift — especially those in their early stages — in order to take advantage of the speed, power, and safety of Swift. One of those projects isn’t actually a software project — it’s the upcoming Swift edition of iOS Games Programming Cookbook. When we began updating the book for Swift, the first thing that we had to do was to rewrite all of the book’s code in the new language. However, a straight re-write from one language into another isn’t enough. Swift behaves differently than Objective-C in very important ways, and that means that your ported Swift code needs to be aware of how Swift does things.

Read more…

Software engineers must continuously learn and integrate

Four ways programmers can thrive in their careers.

Software engineers: themes to watch in software architecture, open source culture and code, data, mobile and the Internet of Things

As O’Reilly continues to build and assess our programming content ecosystem — now more than 30 years in the making — we have gone from covering a few key languages, operating systems, and concepts to a diversification of topics that would have made an editor’s head spin in the 1980s. Our goal, however, remains the same: to continue to provide practical content from experts who help you do your job. An important piece of that goal is to keep you informed as we interpret the trends on the horizon. What follows are a few of the core themes we are focusing on at the moment. Expect these to evolve and change with the speed of innovation.

You can also stay in the loop on the latest analysis and developments through our weekly Programming newsletter.

Actually be a software engineer

The term “full-stack” first emerged in a 2008 blog post (the original post is no longer available, but an archive is published here). The term perhaps reached its canonical definition in a post by Facebook engineer Carlos Bueno. He wrote:

“A ‘full-stack programmer’ is a generalist, someone who can create a non-trivial application by themselves. People who develop broad skills also tend to develop a good mental model of how different layers of a system behave.“

Whether you are striving to be a full-stack programmer, a T-shaped engineer, or you choose to rebuff those terms entirely as mere marketing, what now floats around as a “full-stack developer” definition is incomplete. Read more…