Life Beyond Fife

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What University Challenge considers Computer Science

Happy New Year - 2012 is the year of code! The ICT curriculum in the UK is to be overhauled to make it less about word processors and spreadsheets and more about programming. The smartphone application market has kick-started a new generation of programmers who don't need to be in a team of hundreds to make some interesting, cool and worthwhile. But are we i.e. technology enthusiasts, too gung-ho about coding? Shouldn't we try just as hard to promote computer science? Case in point, over the festive break I managed to catch a special edition of University Challenge and was...

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essays•

Developing in Remote Teams

I don't need to tell you just how revolutionary the internet and other hi-tech telecoms advances have been in changing the way we live and work. Indeed, producing software in distributed teams is a technical challenge that has long since been solved and I'd be surprised to hear from any developer who has never worked with a colleague at a different physical location from them. But making something possible and making something work well are two entirely different things. In this blog post I'll quickly recap some of the different kinds of remote development, share my insights from working both...

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max(e^pi, pi^e)?
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max(e^pi, pi^e)?

Greetings new blog readers and functional programming aficionados. The theme of the content here is rather varied so you're unlikely to see any more functional programming articles for a while. Choosing the next topic for a new audience is crucial though and despite having a couple of ideas I decided to go with the mathematical / coding one. My experiences and advice on effective software development with team members thousands of miles away (told from my personal experience on both sides of the fence ;) will have to wait until next week. Instead I'll talk about a simple mathematical interview...

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Functional Programming For Object Oriented Programmers

After recently remarking about how I finally "got" functional programming I was asked by one of my millions of twitter followers... ¬¬ to write up an explanation of a small Fprogram spoken in terms that fellow O-O programmers would understand. Before I become too entrenched into the functional programming way of thinking, that is, and can't explain it anymore. As a former tutor this is one of the major problems with being able to teach something once you understand it. You've forgotten how not to make sense of the concept and what finally helped you get over the mental parapet....

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Real Life and Video Games
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Real Life and Video Games

At university, the "What do you study?" ice-breaker didn't really work so well when your answer was "Computer Science". However, a historian friend of mine was by contrast frustrated at how open ended her subject area was. "So maybe no-one's particularly interested by what you do but when I say what I study it's always, 'Medieval History? Oh, I've heard of a King...'." In a similar vein another friend of mine is a 3D artist making Playstation 3 games and he suffers from strangers "educating" him on what would make a good game. I know most of us have artistic...

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coding•

Caveats on actually using async and await

With the next release of .Net making a big push for parallelism-for-everyone-made-easy, I thought I'd take this opportunity to see if it really is as simple as they say. The most recent issue of the MSDN magazine has three articles regarding the changes to the Clanguage and what goes on under the hood when the programmer uses the new async and await keywords. This article looks at the challenges I faced in modifying an existing codebase to take advantage of the new functionality. .Net 4.5 Asynchronicity 101 I'll cut through some of the Microsoft boiler plate that builds up as...

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