Life Beyond Fife

Engineering from the glorious Kingdom

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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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Fantasy Football League Team Selector 2012-13
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Fantasy Football League Team Selector 2012-13

UPDATED VERSION: Fantasy Football Team Selector 2013-14 It's that exciting time of year again. I know, I know, London 2012 and all that but who really wants to watch amateur archers and beginner judo students when the English Premier League is about to restart? For those who weren't here last year, I announced in an overly technical way an area of artificial intelligence called constraint programming. Never mind all that though: here is an Excel spreadsheet that will help you improve your Fantasy Football League team for the Official Premier League version. EDIT: I've also added a Yahoo! version but...

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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...

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Modular WPF Interfaces
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Modular WPF Interfaces

Imagine a completely modularised approach to designing user interfaces. For instance, say you design a user interface with one or more bits left blank. You give said blank regions a name and rely on someone else to provide a DLL that populates that part of the window with something shiny and functional. The keener among you will be aware that this functionality has already been in existance for quite some time now. Indeed, I've just described every Firefox plug-in ever written. But the modular approach to user interface design is one every application should have, not just customisable systems with...

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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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