I recently went to DDD8 and had a fantastic time. It has to be one of my more favoured tech events for a number of reasons; I get to chat with some very passionate industry people whom are almost always inspiring in some way. I catch up with friends I haven’t seen in a while and hear what they have been up to, this year I got to catch up with @robcthegeek and @johnnonolan from my RCP sessions which was great. There’s also the insight into new technologies and the explanation from some very knowledgeable developers of some technologies I’ve really wanted to have a look at but haven’t yet had the chance. Read more…
Whilst on my exciting snowy vacation in the French Alps I had lots of time to reflect on the past year. I managed to achieve a number of things on my hit list last year. So this year I have decided to create another goals list. This way it’s much easier to focus on what you want to achieve by the end of the year and makes it far more measurable.
I sat down to think about the things I wanted to achieve this year and I produced a rather extensive list, more like a five year plan! So I’ve managed to whittle the list down to five goals Read more…
A few weeks ago my colleague @duncanbutler and I presented an information forum on Testing. It went down incredibly well and we have seen an large increase in interest in the topic, which in my opinion is half the battle!
I’ll do a brief run through of how we presented the talk and you are welcome to download the powerpoint slides if you would like to present it to other groups. Feel free to edit them to suit.
Testing is a huge topic to cover so don’t expect to cover everything in one session. We decided to outline the 3 main subsections of testing, Regression, Integration and Unit Testing. We focused largely on Regression testing for this session as we had noticed that this was of more interest to people. At this stage we felt it was more about getting people interested and listening to the concept rather than dictating how testing procedures should be followed. Read more…
Remote Collaborate Programming (RCP) is an activity I’ve been dipping into over the past few months and it’s great! Essentially what it is pairing on a wider scale combined with project collaboration from your own home.
With RCP you’re not just limited to two people, you can extend to a group. So far I’ve only tried this with two other people (@JohnnoNolan and @RobCTheGeek) and it’s worked very well. I’m sure there would come a point when there would be too many participants and it would become too difficult to code together all at once so you would have to break off into sub sections, this is where the project collaboration would come into play. The idea is to get together with people to plan and code a project and at the end of a session/multiple sessions have a tangible product to show for your efforts. This project doesn’t have to be something big it could, for example, just be the completion of a Kata. Read more…
What’s a wire frame?
A wireframe is basically a mockup. It’s a skeleton used to give an idea of how a project may look and function. To me it’s the transition of ideas in my head to ideas on a page.
Why should I create a wire frame?
I find wire framing allows me to convey an idea in a more structured and visualised manner, which can help others to conceptualise an idea as a real life product. I believe it to be especially beneficial when pitching an idea to non technical people as they often need a visual representation of the idea.
Creating a wireframe
I used to create my wire frames on paper or in Photoshop and this seemed like a perfectly viable way of doing things until I stumbled across Balsamiq. Ever since I’ve been desperate to give it a whirl, my degree coursework has given me just that opportunity. Read more…
This post is for those who feel that they are lacking in confidence or know someone that is. It’s designed to empathise and motivate and to suggest some possible confidence boosters if you’re ever feeling like you’re not quite good enough.
This isn’t just for you, it’s for me too – a little pick-me-up and reminder of what I need to be doing to get my confidence back on track if my reserves are a bit low. It’s not going to apply to everyone, some people are confident all of the time. Much as my last post – this is me and my experiences as a junior however after discussing it with friends of mine I know there are others that battle with some of the same issues. So I’ve made a list of a few common confidence knockers that you may identify with and some confidence boosters I try to employ that may help. Read more…
I’ve decided to write this post mainly to remind myself in a few years time of what it’s like to be a junior and how I felt I was best taught, the problems I faced and how I was helped to overcome them. I’m also hoping it will help to give others a guide of how to deal with Juniors and to maybe give other juniors a post they can identify with and to leave them feeling that they are not alone in the issues they are facing. Read more…
A Blog: “A personal or corporate website in the form of an online journal”
I recently wrote a post for the blog I contribute to at work called “What’s the point of blogs and blogging?” it highlighted a number of things, a few of which were company specific but a number of points could be applied to anyone whom uses the interwebs.
As I mentioned in previous posts I went to FOWA a couple of weeks back and I asked a number of people if they blogged, I was mostly met with ‘No’ which saddened me as all of the people I asked were intelligent and when in conversation had some interesting points, great ideas and valuable advice. If only they had a place where I could remind myself of this information when I got home?! So on the back of this I decided I wanted to express why I thought blogging had a lot of value and why I think YOU should do it! Read more…
So after reviewing a few peoples code I thought I’d upload a video on how to create resharper snippets, and in particular the ones I use for the calculator kata. It’s my first video so be kind, this is about the 4th take.
I may well have missed some bits out so just make a comment below and I’ll be sure to make a note of it in the blog.
So what is FOWA? FOWA is an acronym for Future of Web Apps and is an event fun by Carsonified. It’s an event that I was fortunate enough to be able to attend this year and one that gave me such a large insight into the web apps of today and tomorrow.
There were many well know tech idols that appeared at this years event, Scott Gu, Kevin Rose and Mike Butcher to name a small few. It was an intense 2 day conference of highly interesting and eye opening presentations.
All of the presentations were interesting and beneficial and I struggled to whittle them down to a compiled a list of points from those that I found particularly interesting, but here goes.
I recently went to DDD8 and had a fantastic time. It has to be one of my more favoured tech events for a number of reasons; I get to chat with some very passionate industry people whom are almost always inspiring in some way. I catch up with friends I haven’t seen in a while and hear what they have been up to, this year I got to catch up with @robcthegeek and @johnnonolan from my RCP sessions which was great. There’s also the insight into new technologies and the explanation from some very knowledgeable developers of some technologies I’ve really wanted to have a look at but haven’t yet had the chance. Read more…
