Open Space Coding Day (31st Jan 2009) : So It Begins..

I recently got a tweet from Alan Dean asking if I wanted to come along to Open Space Coding Day, I only had one answer in my mind: “hell yeah”.

One of my many targets for this year is to ante up my geek game (as I put it). This has many faucets, which I hope to blog about soon, one of them being network, shut up, listen and learn.

Now, I am under no illusions, I am totally ready to admit that I am not a great developer, I try hard for sure - but I know I have plenty of room for improvement. I’ve had the privilege of networking with some really smart people on services such as Twitter. Now as a student without a master, I need to make sure I expose myself to as many smart people as possible.

I am now sat on the train on my way to London Waterloo. I had to get up quite early to get it, so I’m looking quite a mess :)

Still, I can’t help but feel a little nervous, the guest list is containing some really smart people (that I am looking forward to meeting), but I really think I am going to be the guy bringing the GPA down! :S

Side Note: Just passed Winchester – beautiful sunrise. I would take a pic but the trees keep whizzing past in the way :)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

GTD: Biphasic Sleep Experiment – Day 4

Physical State/Tiredness Same as yesterday really, awoke feeling really fresh and alert first thing in the morning. I again took a nap at work at 1230-1300. There has been a fair bit of interest about the napping at work so I thought I would take a minute to talk about it here (see below). Other than that, I did awake from my afternoon nap rather tired and groggy (took me 15-20 mins to get head together) but I actually think this is related to food since I ate a rather large pizza before sleeping.. :\ I have also found that even though it is great having the brain running longer, it can equally be hard to shut off. I have started going to bed with a book at 0200 so I can start to wind down to sleep mode for 0300. Staying up to 0300 is NOT a good idea, you really need to be going to sleep “ FOR 0300 ” not “ AT 0300 ”. Napping at Work Here’s what I do: At about 1200, I do a quick scoot around the team to see if there is anything they need from me, I then tie off any loose end
Read more

Privacy Online – How Much Would a “I’ll Google You” Get About You?

Image
Even though online privacy has been a subject that everyone has known about for a long time, I still cant help but feel that with the explosion in social networking, a lot of the basic principles seem to have been lost somewhere. By “principles” I mean: Make yourself as hard to personally identify as possible. People on the Internet should not be able to find where you live (unless you want them to). You need to protect your friends and family as well as yourself, don’t put their information on display without permission. In short, people should only ever know what you would be happy with someone shouting from a top of the building, with everyone stood around it, and pointing at you. Not sharing information from one source with another (e.g. automatic “I’ll email your friends for you, just give me your ID and password for [service]”. Some of the Problems There have been numerous issues with private information being found on the Int
Read more

TDD – Getting Started with Test-Driven Development

I have been expressing interest in getting up and running with TDD for quite some time, probably the best part of nearly two years in fact! (wow). I have always struggled to get going though. In my previous job I was pretty much flying solo, and even though I am in a 6-man team in my new job, we still are pretty isolated (not my choice!). Every time I have gone to the programming community and asked “how do I get started?” I pretty much got the same response wherever I went - “Just do it”. This was real frustrating because it can be so overwhelming, if you don’t know where to start, how can you start? So I started to dig deeper for as many TDD/Automated Testing sites as I could, even if it was pages and pages of stuff that I didn’t want to know, if I got one little snippet of something useful, I would be happy. I came across some great sites (links will follow). Some were very, very simple. Almost so simple that they don’t really cover the testing, they cov
Read more