I recently contributed to SwiftSyntax, a subproject of the Swift open-source project. Building Swift and its subprojects from scratch and then unit-testing them takes about three hours, and the Terminal command is both long and complicated. A build-and-test run can output more than a megabyte to Terminal. Some of this output is potentially useful for diagnosing build-or-test failures. As an iOS developer, I haven’t spent much time in Terminal, but, in the course of running long and long-running Terminal commands recently, I reacquainted myself with some Unix tricks that I developed in the late 90s while working primarily on AIX, which, like macOS, is a Unix. These tricks could potentially benefit anyone running Terminal commands that are long, that take a long time to complete, or that generate a lot of output.

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I took an extended break from the software industry. For one of those years, I was an IT guy. For eight of those years, I was a lawyer. I haven’t hitherto mentioned this period on my blog, one mercenary goal of which is to enhance my iOS-developer brand. But I value the skills I acquired during these years because they remain useful. This post describes two examples.

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Science is about revealing objective truth, for example the orbit of Earth around the Sun or the ultimate interchangeability of matter and energy. Kurt Krebsbach has argued that “computer science”, despite having the word “science” in its name, is not a science. If Krebsbach is right, what is software development, which I define, for the purposes of this post, as the practical application of computer science? I view software development as a form of creative expression, often fun, that sometimes has the side-effect of creating a useful artifact, a piece of software. This post posits that norms and style are important in software development, as in English-prose composition, another form of creative expression.

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