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The exit polls from GoRuCo are in, and I placed last with an averaged rating of 2.66 out of 5. Bah! Even Gordon Brown can do better than that. To be honest I'm not surprised, so those of you who feel you have to say positive things about the video are now officially excused ;p It was the first outing of what is actually a very difficult topic to tackle without cutting some strange corners and I'm thankful to Francis and the rest of the team for taking the risk in the first place. I owe them bigtime. The audience comments lead me to suspect that I need to use less British idiom next time I speak in the US (e.g. I had several people on the day ask me what 'blue sky research' is), and that contrary to my experience here in Europe I should have included more code. Overall it seems that those who took the time to comment were very disappointed by this omission and by the lack of a clear and explicit point to the talk. Hopefully when the slides are judged as an artefact in their own right that will be less of an issue, especially as I will be adding additional content in the coming months including more code samples. It also seems my experiment with the format didn't work for many people: I hoped that having the slides running on auto whilst talking more generally about the topic would allow me to engage better with the audience, but clearly it creates a disconnect that breaks normal user expectations. That leaves me in a bit of a quandry as I find the slide-driven approach to presentation very restrictive and unless someone is discussing a very specific technical point that needs them for clarity, it tends to send me to sleep. That's doubly true if I'm giving the presentation myself and am really doing nothing more than parrot what's on the screen whilst playing "click the clicker". As to there being a point, I wasn't entirely sure there was one myself until I was closing. After all, this is just stuff you can do in Ruby on a Unix box. But I guess that is the point. Unix systems' coding is mostly just scripting the kernel and Ruby is a surprisingly friendly language for doing that, ergo Ruby is a good systems' programming language. I did say towards the end that if just one person in the audience got that message it justified the trip, so a big thanks to whomever wrote: "My favorite talk, very inspired to both write systems' programming scripts in Ruby and also to have a beer". I guess that sums up what I flew more than 3000 miles to share and I hope the anonymous author has as much fun doing both as I have over the last fifteen years. And if they see me at a conference sometime, mine's a pint of mild! Tags: public appearance, ruby, unix
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Wednesday night I joined a friendly gather of dynamic language fans for an evening of lightning talks at BCS HQ in Central London. It's easy when you're part of a specific language community to lose track of the broader divisions in programming so it was interesting seeing the perspective of Perl, SmallTalk and JavaScript users on many of the issues we battle with in the Ruby community. Some of the Perl code even looked intelligible ;p I was particularly interested in the coverage of how SmallTalk handles data persistence. Don't get me wrong, Ruby has several powerful ORMs that fulfil the basic database persistence needs of developers adequately, but to be honest I find them all hard work in one way or another. Mostly they require me to do lots of procedural stuff that really ought to be automatic and whilst I suspect the SmallTalk answers will have their own shortcomings they may spark a few ideas. Anyway that's slated for further research when I can grab some down-time, which by the look of things may not be until the autumn. The most thought-provoking talk of the evening was on genetic algorithms in Perl, and I really wish I could remember the speaker's name as we had a long chat afterwards in the pub. I know a bit about GA from years back, but suddenly it all seems to be in much better focus. Unfortunately I now have this urge to use the technique with function calls in an AST and brew self-evolving applications. I'm not entirely sure how useful that would be, but I suspect a very deep rabbit-hole awaits sometime in the future. The net.goth posse were pretty well represented. Kitty gave a quick rundown of P5VM, a port of Perl to the JVM, and Zefram run through some of the weird type collision that are possible with Perl's bless function. The latter talk made me glad that in Ruby we use message passing as I imagine DuckTyping in Perl must be a right pain. I'm not sure if Joel counts as one of the collective (truth be told I'm massively out of the loop on that sort of thing) but I'll include his quick rundown of ECMAScript for XML here anyway - just for the cool t-shirt. My former colleague Tim gave an interesting overview of Shoes, a Ruby GUI I've spoken about previously at RailsConf Europe. Of course being a graphic designer originally he makes it all look incredibly easy. I gave the five-minute version of my Goruco presentation, with an undue emphasis on writing Ruby code like you would C :) That's not what I actually do with this stuff, but it's always good for cheap laughs. Later we all retired to the pub where much beer was consumed and then it was off the the N29 back home, arguing drunkenly with Zefram over something or other. All in all a fun evening. Tags: public appearance, ruby, unix
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...but I'm not sure where to go. For thirteen years I've made something approximating a living from a passion that dates back into my pre-teens, but as time has passed I've become increasingly disillusioned and disinterested. Gone are the days when I could reliably find mad little companies looking to do improbable things, bending ones and zeroes to their will. Gone the demand for programmers with skill and art. Everywhere I've turned in recent years I've been dogged by the shadow of agile development, something I've ranted over more than once in these pages. In a sense I've been hoist by my own petard as in the late 1990s these were the techniques I told my clients to use if they wanted their underskilled graduate development teams to be vaguely effective. Little did I dream that a decade later the industry would not only have adopted the core principle of testing their code properly before unleashing it on an unsuspecting world, but that it would have gone to the other extreme of building ever more burdensome test suites. It's as if the world's architects all agreed that every single strut and support had to incorporate a strain gauge and that during construction each addition of a brick to the edifice required that every gauge be checked. The technology exists to do this - sensor networks and intelligent buildings have been mooted many times over the last two decades by futurologists - but to date no one has demonstrated that there is any practical gain in doing this. In a recent exchange on the LRUG mailing list I explained some of my qualms with the current fad for Test Driven Development, which I'll probably blog about when I've fleshed the argument out in greater depth, but as usual people who are into that fad don't get why it's a fool's errand. I guess I could write this off as being a generational thing - I routinely meet web developers who weren't even born when I cut my first Basic programs - but that presumes that building flexible and reliable software is a new innovation which it most emphatically isn't. Anyway be that as it may I'm sick to the back teeth of developers with at most five years of experience telling me what constitutes good practice or second guessing instincts that I've honed over almost thirty years of chasing the bleeding edge. As such I'm strongly considering leaving the industry altogether and restricting my future involvement to after-hours hacking on projects of value to me along with the occasional conference. My decamping is probably no real loss to the industry anyway as I'm a truculent curmudgeon and not much of a team player, but more worrying is that in a recent conversation with a recruiter he mentioned that quite a few of the people on his books had already jumped ship. I guess I'm not alone in disliking cultish impositions on my working life. I guess the next few days I'm going to have to think long and hard about the future. today I am mostly: dysfunctional
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Your result for The Howard Gardner 7 Intelligences (Pt. 1 of 2) Test... You scored: 9 out of 12 Linguistics, 11 out of 12 Math, 10 out of 12 Music, and 7 out of 12 Spatial
Because this test doesn't give you a score like an IQ test here is how to interpret your results: Categories with high scores are those to which you are strongly inclined. Categories with lower scores are those to which you are less inclined but those which support your stronger intelligences. Because of limits on OKCupid you need to take both parts 1 and 2 to have the complete picture of your intelligences distribution. Part 1 Part 2Also, this test only covers 7 intelligences. Officially Prof. Gardner has 9 intelligences now and is rumored to be working on a 10th. The intelligences not covered on either test are Naturalistic and Spiritual/Existential Intelligences. For more information please visit Professor Gardner's site http://www.howardgardner.com/ If you enjoyed this test please rate it! Also, be sure you check out my other equally awesome tests. J.R.R. Tolkien’s Life My Movie TestThe Things I Value Test
Take The Howard Gardner 7 Intelligences (Pt. 1 of 2) Test at HelloQuizzy
Your result for The Howard Gardner 7 Intelligences (Pt. 2 of 2) Test... You scored 8 out of 12 Kinesthetic, 4 out of 12 Interpersonal and 10 out of 12 Intrapersonal
Because this test doesn't give you a score like an IQ test here is how to interpret your results: Categories with high scores are those to which you are strongly inclined. Categories with lower scores are those to which you are less inclined but those which support your stronger intelligences. Because of limits on OKCupid you need to take both parts 1 and 2 to have the complete picture of your intelligences distribution. Part 1 Part 2Also, this test only covers 7 intelligences. Officially Prof. Gardner has 9 intelligences now and is rumored to be working on a 10th. The intelligences not covered on either test are Naturalistic and Spiritual/Existential Intelligences. For more information please visit Professor Gardner's site http://www.howardgardner.com/ If you enjoyed this test please rate it! Also, be sure you check out my other equally awesome tests. J.R.R. Tolkien’s Life My Movie TestThe Things I Value Test
Take The Howard Gardner 7 Intelligences (Pt. 2 of 2) Test at HelloQuizzy
today I am mostly: bedtime!!!
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