Life Beyond Fife

Engineering from the glorious Kingdom

All Posts

Explore all articles from Life Beyond Fife - Page 12

Yo dawg, I heard you like functions
follies•

Yo dawg, I heard you like functions

It's hopefully old news to you all but the free lunch is over (NB this article is 10 years old). TL;DR – as we come up against the physical limits of how small transistors can be future computation gains will come from more processors, not faster processors. We can already see this looking at the number of cores we have available in development standard laptops. Writing code that can distribute its workload across multiple cores will only become more important as time goes on. As we move more and more services to AWS ensuring we get the most value for...

9 min readRead more →
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 →