Life Beyond Fife

Engineering from the glorious Kingdom

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A git workflow for beginners
follies•

A git workflow for beginners

The web is awash with introductions and guides to using git. There's this visual guide here, that interactive tutorial there, reams of documentation, and of course all kinds of troubleshooting help. But if you're coming from a traditional Version Control System (SVN, Perforce, Clearcase etc.) the main barrier to using git is not answering the question, "How to I checkout and commit code changes?", but rather, "How do I use all these complex features to develop software?" This guide is a complementary resource to the others, providing a working template of how you should use git in order to deliver...

11 min readRead more →
coding•

Converting XML to JSON

XML and JSON are the two most common generic standards for passing representation state information in web APIs. So when I recently needed to convert XML to JSON, I didn't even think about the structure of XML, I simply looked for a library to do it. "Why isn't there a library to do this?" I thought. Quite simply, because you cannot express XML as JSON and vice versa. There are too many grey areas where a choice needs to be made about how the conversion should be done. A lack of bijective one-to-one mapping means that no-one will create a...

4 min readRead more →
Before you learn to program
compsci•

Before you learn to program

How should you begin to learn programming? What language should you pick? What are the long term, safe bets you should ensure you pick up so you're ready to succeed over the next ten years? These are the wrong questions to answer. Programming is the valuable, practical skill but the discipline that enables and supports it is Computer Science. Begin from that position and the lessons you learn will hold not only during the lifetime of the programming languages you choose, but throughout your own life as well. But Computer Science though, that's hardly the right place for a beginner....

12 min readRead more →
essays•

Death By A Million Cuts

Individuals within the software development community are in one of two states. One believes that there is a deep rooted problem of sexism that constructs multiple barriers against females joining, and thus deprives this community of the majority of a talent pool that makes up half the population. The other, simply hasn't realised it yet. I used to think there was no problem. Most people in a position of power use deliberate, analytical thinking to evaluate people honestly and fairly regardless of any stereotypes that may exist. Job vacancies and course placements go to the most able worker or student,...

12 min readRead more →
compsci•

Confusing Christmas with Halloween

Understanding how computers work is essential in allowing us to use them as tools. We therefore need to translate some of their codes and numbers to things that we more naturally understand. Unfortunately, there’s no escaping the mathematics of it – converting binary numbers to decimal and vice versa is an algebraic operation. Though it can be done with a scientific calculator, the process is straightforward and can be done simply enough with a pen and some paper. To convert from binary to decimal is the easiest base transformation there is. We’ll walk through an example by converting $1001 \space...

9 min readRead more →