Wednesday 23 June 2010

Countdown to holidays

After a solid year of working, I will be taking a break and doing some proper travelling - instead of just weekends away.

Having given the required 8 weeks notice at work and received confirmation of the necessary approval of a director, the first week of accommodation and transport has been booked and discussions are well underway for options for the following two weeks.

Hopefully that volcanic activity in Iceland will not flare up again.

Thursday 17 June 2010

Only so many hours in the day

Oh the joys of the software industry.
  • Analysis
  • Design
  • Estimation
  • Implementation
  • Testing
  • Deploy
  • Maintenance

Just another day.

Sunday 13 June 2010

Youtube videos

A few years ago I used to carry my video camera around quite a lot.

I uploaded some clips to YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/sounie


Eventually the novelty wore off, so I generally only have the camera with me for weddings and other big events.

Today I had a look around the "Insight" section of my YouTube account and discovered that a YouTube rival site has embedded some of my video content. If it was an individual on Facebook or something like that then I wouldn't mind, but this appears to be completely uncredited and scraped directly from YouTube.

I've now disabled embedding, but it appears as though the site may have taken a copy of the content - very naughty.

Wednesday 9 June 2010

Language in software development

While reading the Martin Fowler Refactoring book on the tube yesterday, I got to thinking about how programming languages are similar to general written and spoken languages.

Here are a couple of examples:
  • Terms that mean the same thing, but are called different names (synonyms).
  • Terms that share the same name, but mean different things (homonyms).
Much like written English, it requires a certain amount of context to determine the meaning of a term within a block of code.

Having a "Ubiquitous Language" within a system, as detailed in Domain Driven Design by Eric Evans, helps to ensure that developers use unambiguous terminology that even the end users of the system should be able to comprehend.