“Could you find a conference a bit closer and a bit cheaper?” In 2007, the company I was working for at the time was concerned about the cost to send its four backend developers all the way to Lithuania for EuroPython. We weren’t aware of a UK Python conference at the time, but we had […]
It seems fitting to be writing something in the lead up to the 2017 election, because my political awakening began thirty years ago during the 1987 general election. My primary school teacher organised a mini-election, and I was one of the candidates. The other kids were focused on issues like school or general kid stuff, […]
This blog has been dormant for a few years. This has mainly been down to a lack of time, but also a touch of burnout with writing purely tech-related posts. Since the last blog post I’ve been learning the programming language Rust (which then got me interested in trying out OCaml), and I’ve been heavily […]
I try to learn a new programming language each year. In recent years, my bias has been towards a more functional nature with Erlang and Clojure being two very enjoyable and intellectually satisfying choices. I didn’t make much fanfare of my new language for 2011, mainly because it was born of necessity rather than a […]
I attended PyCon UK 2011 at the weekend, which was loosely run as an unconference. As I was about to start writing about the conference, I realised I haven’t written anything about PyCon AU last month in Sydney, which I also had the pleasure to attend. Two conferences in two months! I’ll try to mention […]
Back in 2004, I took a sabbatical from software development to pursue my passion for snowboarding. It was a decision that lead to a parallel “career” as a snowboard, and later ski, instructor. Aside from a few communication skills, I never really thought the two would intertwine. However, from instructing came an interest in coaching […]
It’s been something like 11 or 12 years since I first heard of the book “Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software”. It was around the time I was beginning to realise there might be something to this idea of object-oriented software development. I’ve been pondering patterns ever since. For those not aware of patterns […]
Before I start on my 2011 list, it’s time for a quick review. My list for 2010 was: Clojure (http://clojure.org/) CouchDB (http://couchdb.apache.org/) Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK) (http://www.nltk.org/) PyGame (http://www.pygame.org/news.html) Twisted (http://twistedmatrix.com/trac/) XMPP (http://xmpp.org/) I spent the year going to the London Clojure Dojo and I must admit that I do like the language and will […]
(This is based on a 15 minute talk for the London Python Code Dojo – slides available from SlideShare) My interest in FluidDB began earlier this year when I attended a talk by Nicholas Tollervey at the London Clojure Dojo. I was expecting yet another talk about yet another non-relational database, but what I discovered […]
Last year was C# and Erlang, this year was Clojure thanks in part to the excellent London Clojure Code Dojo. (Bear with me for the next paragraph, and the subjective nature of later bits) Clojure has been an interesting experience because I have neither a Lisp nor JVM background. I’ve found myself having to deal […]
John's Reflections 