Life Beyond Fife

Engineering from the glorious Kingdom

Essays

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Becoming a Web Developer

"[Stanford's] students come out, and they believe that C and C++ are the fabric with which God wove the Universe. OK? And they truly [think]: what is it with all these other languages?" Dynamic Languages Strike Back – Steve Yegge A blaze of nepotism from my sister saw me land my first paid contracting gig back in 1998. The company was technologically naïve and it was pure HTML/CSS. The start to a potentially exciting story perhaps, but alas, the summer ended and I went back to finish the last two years of my undergraduate degree in computer science and –...

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Failure and Unfair Comparisons
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Failure and Unfair Comparisons

I have failed. Earlier this spring when I rejoined the world of the working I pledged to continue the blog I started over a year ago but with, naturally, a less demanding post frequency. But even my plan to produce one per month seems to have slipped by for the month of September. I have excuses around a few packed social weeks, but I suppose ultimately it comes down to a matter of priorities. I've been working on my projects but not at the required pace. There are a couple of ways to look at this. I could view it...

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Barrier To Entry

The greatest advert for being a software developer today is the low – practically non-existent – barrier to entry. Repeated falling hardware costs, the success of the open source software movement, and the proliferation of online help resources mean that practically any person, from any culture or background who has access to a computer and the internet can master the art and science of software development, or at the very least give it a go. And yet conversely that is its greatest weakness; why as a discipline it will never be taken seriously; and that we'll never receive the true...

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How I lost, and regained, my coding mojo
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How I lost, and regained, my coding mojo

For as long as I can remember I've been programming and I never seriously thought about doing anything else for a living. But becoming and remaining a software developer is a journey, not a destination. See if you can identify with this situation: I worked for the same company for six years and though I kept up with the latest .Net changes as my job required ("LINQ eh, what's that?") I didn't really learn much new. By the end of my time there I realised things were far from right. It wasn't that I didn't know relevant technologies that propspective...

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Banking Isn't Evil
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Banking Isn't Evil

I truly believe that banks, or any institution that exists by making trades based on financial instruments, is not inherently evil. I stand by that statement even though it flies in the face of overwhelming public opinion. They – the institutions and their employees – can make obscene profits both individually and as corporate entities; they may gamble recklessly with the hard earned money of others; they may charge those near the breadline with unreasonable rates further compounding their problems; they can offer little support to struggling businesses when they need it in a harsh economic climate which, ultimately, was...

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Developing in Remote Teams

I don't need to tell you just how revolutionary the internet and other hi-tech telecoms advances have been in changing the way we live and work. Indeed, producing software in distributed teams is a technical challenge that has long since been solved and I'd be surprised to hear from any developer who has never worked with a colleague at a different physical location from them. But making something possible and making something work well are two entirely different things. In this blog post I'll quickly recap some of the different kinds of remote development, share my insights from working both...

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