After trying to get things working with my old blog system, I’ve punted yet again and started over. Rather than try to move everything here, I’ve brought across some of the posts that meant the most to me when I wrote them.
I’m still extracting media from the posts and learning how to use this new website generator - Hugo. At some point, I might even write something else here. :)
In the course of my work I see a lot of code. Sample projects, full applications, frameworks, and proofs-of-concept have all crossed my desk at one time or another. In the labs at WWDC I see various bits of code which are giving developers trouble. The source of the project doesn’t seem to matter much; the problem is the same.
The problem I see time and again in all of this code is an unclear separation of responsibilities.
It’s been a while since I visited my parents in Connecticut, so this year I made the trip to see them at the old homestead. The house and the town have some family history and I’m always reminded of it when I return home. I grew up in this house and my parents still live here:
(I need to find this picture. Please bear with me.)
The house is over 200 years old.
When Steve stepped down as CEO, I wrote to let him know what effect he and his company had on a ten year old kid:
Steve,
When I was in the fourth grade my parents bought an Apple ][+ when 48K was a lot of RAM and disk drives were uncommon. I discovered in that computer a world which I could play in, learn in, and experiment in. I was ten years old and I’d found something incredible in the machine you’d helped create.
When we lived in a rented house in a different neighborhood in Mountain View, we had fantastic neighbors on each side of us.
On the north side was an older man named Ev. He grew beautiful roses in his front yard. He would stand on the other side of the fence and talk about gardening with Kat, or he would tell us stories about the huge oak tree in his back yard, and stories about the neighborhood and how it developed.
My grandfather was a tremendously neat guy.
He was many many things. Growing up, he was of course Dad’s dad. He was a surgeon - both in the Army during World War II and in civilian life before and after in Rochester, NY. He had tremendous compassion for his patients. I remember talking with him about some of the people he had treated, and the care in his voice about the man who was mentally ill and had hurt himself was so clear even the young child I was then could hear it.