Follies

Explore articles about follies on Life Beyond Fife

Page 3 of 5

follies•7 August 2012

One year in...

Happy Anniversary! In updating my Fantasy Football League Team Selector Spreadsheet for the new Premier League season, I realised it's been over one year since the inception of this humble tech blog. I've gotten on my soap box a few times about how software development should be done, provided some programming tutorials and uploaded some executables with GPL sourcecode. I didn't know exactly what I wanted to achieve other than freshen up my tech skills but I feel it's given me so much more than I hoped it would. The plan for the next year is to get a bit...

1 min readRead more →

follies•18 April 2012

New Music - Part I

Welcome back guys! Wow, it's really hard to get code out of the door when you've got to work full-time. Still, no matter, here is how I got on with my latest project: extending the previous one until it's bashed out into something a bit more useful. To give a bit more background on just what the previous blog post was about, it was an ASP application knocked up quickly over the course of a weekend to give me something to show for an interview I had with Scotland's premier web technology company, Skyscanner (setup via the awesome Quantum Recruitment...

6 min readRead more →

follies•6 April 2012

/Sabbatical

Just so you know, I am still alive... ...but the sabbatical finally had to come to an end. I'm very excited to enter the world of work once more. No really. ¬¬ I'm sure my brand of proactive problem solving will have me going places soon enough... ...especially seeing as I'm no longer long-haired, bearded, nor a wearer of rock t-shirts, combats or skater shoes i.e. a typical software developer. I now own four suits. Four. Rest assured, now the upheaval of relocating and job hunting has ceased, blog posts shall once again resume. Possibly not at the rate of...

1 min readRead more →

follies•20 February 2012

A Restful Weekend

This is an amusing play-on-words type of blog post as I can't remember the last time I had a restful weekend. I'm simultaneously job hunting and flat hunting in Edinburgh from my base back in Fife (thanks Mum & Dad ;) with most of my stuff, half of my CDs and most importantly my guitar back in Cambridge \sigh\ No matter, I press on with a mini project for a RESTful web service using ASP.Net and WCF. A couple of weeks back I tweeted the following: The awesome rateyourmusic.com do have a section within a user's profile page that provides...

5 min readRead more →

follies•6 February 2012

Beauty in Mathematics

Many people look at the beauty in nature and wonder how it all could have possibly been created. You could also look in awe at the Sistine Chapel and feel likewise impressed but we know this was simply the patient brushstrokes of a talented artist with plenty of time. Quite often the most stunning sights in the universe are a result of simple patterns repeating and evolving over time. Though we can't create a planet in a laboratory and fast-forward a few millenia whilst looking in, we can create simple patterns using mathematics. I'm going to show you three such...

3 min readRead more →

follies•12 January 2012

What University Challenge considers Computer Science

Happy New Year - 2012 is the year of code! The ICT curriculum in the UK is to be overhauled to make it less about word processors and spreadsheets and more about programming. The smartphone application market has kick-started a new generation of programmers who don't need to be in a team of hundreds to make some interesting, cool and worthwhile. But are we i.e. technology enthusiasts, too gung-ho about coding? Shouldn't we try just as hard to promote computer science? Case in point, over the festive break I managed to catch a special edition of University Challenge and was...

5 min readRead more →