When I started OCMock almost 20 years ago, I would never have expected it to become so popular. Then again, at the time Objective-C was a niche language used only to develop (some) applications for the Mac. This changed with the iPhone, and dramatically so. And it changed again in about 2016 after Apple had introduced Swift and had made it very clear that Objective-C had not much of a role to play anymore. I wrote about the effect on OCMock a few years ago.

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Seeing all the experiments with GitHub Copilot around me I decided to take Copilot to some difficult terrain (pun intended, see below). A lot of the positive experience is reported with very common programming languages, JavaScript and Python especially, writing code related to web applications. But how would Copilot fare with a less common language and code that’s involving more complicated data structures? To find out I turned to Crellinor, my genetic programming / artificial life simulator written in Rust, which I have talked about before; and I set out to fix some todo’s in the Terrain class.

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The podcast team at the Handelsblatt newspaper invited me to an episode of their So klingt Wirtschaft podcast. Jana Samsonova and I talk about green computing, responsible use of technology, and how moving to a public cloud can reduce CO₂ emissions. As you may have guessed at this stage, the podcast is in German.

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Developer experience platforms have been a hot topic for a while now, and I've talked about them with many of our clients. Last year, I distilled the essence from those client presentations into a talk that I gave a GeeCON Prague, and now the team have made the recording of the talk available on YouTube. DX platforms are not as hyped at Gen AI but if you want to make your developer teams more effective, they are certainly something to look into.

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In this article, published in the funkschau magazine, I discuss an important issue that our modern software supply chains bring when it comes to security: the role of the sprawling web of dependencies.

You can read the article in the online edition of the magazine on page 42. Sorry, no direct link, and the text is in German.

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Travelling is part of being a consultant, and speaking at conferences added an extra amount of travel for me. The Covid-19 pandemic changed this quite dramatically, and looking back at 2022 I am wondering what the “new normal” could be after the pandemic.

The chart above shows some key figures related to my business travel over the past eleven years: the numbers of trips, cities, and countries I visited. A single trip can, and sometimes did, include multiple cities and countries.

The years up to 2019 differ in the details but overall the level of travel is relatively high. In 2020 this changes very visibly, and travel remains low in the “second year of corona”. Even in those years, though, there was some travel: in the first months of 2020, before the lockdowns started, and then the first trips again in autumn 2021. Barcelona in October 2021—to write a new Technology Radar—was the first trip by the way, and GOTO Copenhagen in November 2021 the first in-person conference.

In 2022, travel activity is picking up again, mostly towards the end of the year. It feels too early to make any predictions about what the new normal will look like, but I suspect it’ll remain significantly lower than in the pre-pandemic years.

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As I have mentioned before, I like writing screen savers. This time I revisited one that I wrote over twenty years ago.

At the time I had decided to spend a week in a small town on the Costa Brava in Spain. Two things happened: 1) On the way out I stopped by friends in Barcelona, where I flicked through the book Maeda and Media, and 2) I had brought my Apple PowerBook with me. One of the illustrations in the book stuck with me, and I spent a few hours, while hanging out in that beach town, to code an animated version of the illustration from memory, creating the Maeda Wheels screen saver.

At first I didn’t use the screen saver because I couldn’t make it run smoothly enough. Over time, with better hardware, this got better but it still isn’t great with Intel processors driving 4K screens. So at some point, when I noticed the stuttering again, I decided to start from scratch using the low-level Metal APIs. With the book next to me I also stayed closer to the original illustration in this reinterpretation of my Meada Wheels screen saver.

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