Life Beyond Fife

Engineering from the glorious Kingdom

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XML Serialisation
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XML Serialisation

Recently at work I was confronted by a problem requiring data persistance outside of a database - in this case, a saved parameter project file. Though I'm a convert to the purity and ease of use of JSON, in the land of Enterprise coding, XML is still very much king. Visual Studio provides many tools for not just dealing with XML files but also XSD files: a schema for describing a valid XML source file. Both while at work in creating configuration files, and at home in parsing Amazon's RESTful API results returned in XML data, I've written code to...

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Idea A Day

Perhaps the one constant in becoming an expert in any particular craft is to do it regularly - preferably daily. For some disciplines e.g. skydiving and marathon running, this is prohibitive by being expensive or physically extreme. There are countless other more attainable skills, however, that demand only our time. The purpose of this blog - for me at least - is to provide a place for thoughts on software development in practice and the implementation of ideas. So often it becomes the natural place to trial a new technology but at the heart of every technology is the idea...

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The Difference Between Mean and Median
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The Difference Between Mean and Median

As a non-statistician who every now and then has to understand statistical concepts as if they were second nature, illustrative examples are like gold dust to me. I thought I'd share a small yet extreme sample set that I devised to aid me in understanding the difference between the first statistical moment, the mean, and the similar yet potentially wildly contrasting median. My problem with mathematical definitions Before I present my example, I'm going to get on my soapbox for a minute about the way some, often simple, mathematical concepts are taught. Skip to the next section if this is...

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From Idea to Launch: A Website Dissection
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From Idea to Launch: A Website Dissection

What's New? MUSIC was recently launched, so for those of you who've already read about the idea, architecture and technology stack, you can go straight to the post-launch results and conclusions. For everyone else though... At the beginning of the year I posed a conundrum on Twitter. I wanted some way to make sure I never missed out on a new release by one of the many bands I like. In the end, I had to build it myself. This would be my first website ever after a professional lifetime of enterprise code and it started something that would take...

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What's New? Music
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What's New? Music

At the beginning of the year I posed a conundrum on Twitter. I wanted some way to make sure I never missed out on a new release by one of the many bands I like. In the end, I had to build it myself. This would be my first website ever after a professional lifetime of enterprise code and it started something that would take up a large part of my free time for the next 9 months. I have created the website What's New? MUSIC. Here is my journey. The tweet - which no-one replied to - that started...

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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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