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essays•5 May 2012

How I lost, and regained, my coding mojo

For as long as I can remember I've been programming and I never seriously thought about doing anything else for a living. But becoming and remaining a software developer is a journey, not a destination. See if you can identify with this situation: I worked for the same company for six years and though I kept up with the latest .Net changes as my job required ("LINQ eh, what's that?") I didn't really learn much new. By the end of my time there I realised things were far from right. It wasn't that I didn't know relevant technologies that propspective...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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essays•24 January 2012

Banking Isn't Evil

I truly believe that banks, or any institution that exists by making trades based on financial instruments, is not inherently evil. I stand by that statement even though it flies in the face of overwhelming public opinion. They – the institutions and their employees – can make obscene profits both individually and as corporate entities; they may gamble recklessly with the hard earned money of others; they may charge those near the breadline with unreasonable rates further compounding their problems; they can offer little support to struggling businesses when they need it in a harsh economic climate which, ultimately, was...

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