Recent content on Stefan Lesser
What does it mean to apply or transfer Christopher Alexander’s ideas to the world of software? This is an early draft, written in one go, that I quickly wanted to publish for early feedback and as part of my current studies in the Beautiful Software Initiative . Please get in touch if you have feedback. I can see at least seven different layers where Alexander’s theory of centers and wholeness and…
Part 4 of my blog chain Universal Structure . Start here . As we built up our taxonomy of animals with cats and dogs we talked about things we can point at — things that exist in the real world, like cats and dogs. Entities Let’s call these things in the real world entities . The words we use rarely describe a single entity. We use cat for all kinds of cats. And that’s what makes a…
Part 2 of my Creative Productivity blog chain. Start here . When I decided to reactivate this blog, I thought a lot about how to get into a habit of publishing regularly. I have collected lots of material, many notes and writing ideas, but never got to a point where I actually published anything. Overcoming perfectionism For a long time I thought of publishing on the Internet as adding to…
It just occurred to me what an interesting philosophy software developers have when it comes to change. We use libraries and frameworks on platforms with architectures that we expect to be stable, robust, and reliable. We stack layers of rigid blocks on top of each other, erecting deliberate structures we want to last and stand the test of time. We expect components to be dependable and…
Part 1 of my Creative Productivity blog chain. It crossed my mind to revive this blog with a meta post about writing. But there are too many blogs out there that haven’t published anything in a long time, and the last post describes in great detail how the author plans to focus more on writing and finally publish more content on a regular schedule. Not where I want to end up…
Part 2 of my blog chain Beyond Code . Start here . The A Future of Programming There are so many directions to explore to democratize programming . It’s useful to be opinionated, make some choices upfront, and shrink the solution space a bit. You might disagree with my choices here, and that’s ok. I write them down so we can find out quickly. That doesn’t mean other directions…
Part 3 of my Universal Structure blog chain. Start here . Language Human language, spoken or written, is an amazingly sophisticated invention that has evolved over centuries. We can describe concepts, transmit those descriptions through space and time, and create shared understanding. It’s not perfect, but it does work reasonably well to help us communicate. It’s no coincidence that we…
In a recent discussion on The Future of Coding Slack my understanding of abstraction was challenged. As I currently write about categorization , this was a good reason to reflect on what abstraction means to me. The word gets thrown around lightly in technical discussions. We’re susceptible to just assume that our intuitive understanding of a word is sufficient to wield it as a weapon in…
Part 1 of my blog chain Beyond Code . At the end of 2016, after I had left Apple, and half-way into a year of traveling, I thought about what I wanted to tackle next and wrote down 1 some big ideas that got me excited. As part of a larger document I wrote: Make Developing Software Accessible to Everyone aka “Fix software development” A lot has changed in software development over the…
Part 2 of my Universal Structure blog chain. Start here . As I was thinking about structure and data models, I wondered about how we make decisions every day, almost effortlessly, which are fundamentally data model manipulations: Structuring emails or notes with headings and by moving paragraphs of text around Using lists and tables and knowing which items belong together and how to order them…
Part 1 of my blog chain Universal Structure . In 2018 I wrote a vision document for a start-up I was planning to found shortly after ( spoiler: I chose to not become a founder and am now an investor instead ). The vision was grand: democratize programming and bring the power of computation to everyone, not just developers. Part of the vision document described the approach of how we wanted to…
Category Theory: Resources I’m currently trying to fully understand category theory as it applies to programming. I’m not scared of math, however, I’m also not a mathematician, so I’m looking for an introduction that helps me build intuitive understanding first, and then goes all the way into the formalisms. Here are the resources I am currently reading that I found the most helpful so far:…
Hi, I’m Stefan. A passionate programmer, application architect, and former Apple Technology Evangelist. Follow this blog via RSS . Receive semi-regular email updates . Get in touch via LinkedIn .
I wanted to write a thoughtful article in response to Dominik Wagner’s “On my misalignment with Apple’s love affair with Swift” . During my research I realized, that Chris Lattner had already done this. Sort of. 17 months before Dominik published his piece. Thanks to Marco Arment , Casey Liss , and John Siracusa for recording a fabulous “not an interview show”…