The Appsmiths
Hansen Hsu (via Wil Shipley):
This dissertation is an ethnographic study, accomplished through semi-structured interviews and participant observation, of the cultural world of third party Apple software developers who use Apple’s Cocoa libraries to create apps. It answers the questions: what motivates Apple developers’ devotion to Cocoa technology, and why do they believe it is a superior programming environment? What does it mean to be a “good” Cocoa programmer, technically and morally, in the Cocoa community of practice, and how do people become one?
A free account is required to download the paper, but it looks like it’s well worth reading—or at least skimming, since it’s over 500 pages.
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A free account is required to download the paper
That's some amazing process on the dissertation-distribution front! It used to be that (at least in the humanities) UMI-ProQuest had a monopoly on dissertations and they were something like $20 a pop for access (though if your institution was a subscriber to some particular tier of service, you could access any dissertation written by a student at your institution for free).
