Coding Ninja

After smashing my smartphone screen (a Sony Xperia S), I got a quote for a repair because foolishly I hadn’t insured it. After hearing the quote I politely said no and hung up. An alternative option would have been to try and repair the screen myself, however I didn’t want to take the risk of further damage, besides life is too short for that kind of hassle. Since the phone was still functional, bar the cracked screen I decided to carry on using it until I a replacement smartphone was available. [Read More]

With summer in full swing it becomes harder to sit crammed behind a computer wresting with code for the best part of the day. Having some time off from work has given me the opportunity to start on my growing list of “things to do”. I’m a bit of a tech junkie, and as such have lots of bits and bobs lying around. One item on my “to do” list was to sort this stuff out. [Read More]

Your cursor is still flashing at the same point and you have been staring at your screen blankly for over ten minutes. You make any excuse to get away from programming, “I’ll go make one more coffee” you tell yourself. When you start writing code you only delete it to start over again. If you are experiencing this level of procrastination then you may have programmers block. Writer’s block or mental block is widely accepted in most creative fields. [Read More]

In my experience the process of finding the right candidate can be stressful. It appears that within the IT industry, the cases of failure are higher than the successes. In the absence of any standards the interview process is inconsistent and conducted using what can only be described as “IT Folklore”. Part of the problem starts with most recruitment agencies. Agencies work in an almost mechanical way. Instead of filtering candidates intelligently they seem to filter using a dumb keyword or “buzzword” match approach. [Read More]

I was explaining the mechanics of how a computer works to a friend, when I realised that although I knew the basic concepts, I lacked the exact details. This reminded me once again about a fantastic courseware entitled _“The Elements of Computing Systems”_ by Noam & Shimon. If you have not yet come across this courseware I highly recommend it. In twelve steps the student builds a real computer as the quote states “from NANDs to Tetris”. [Read More]

At the beginning of last week, an article appeared on Proggit (that has since disappeared?). entitled _“The Tech Industry’s Darkest Secret: It’s All About Age”_, written by Vivek Wadhwa. Incidentally this is a nice follow on from a post I had written just a few weeks prior _“Where Do You See Yourself in 10 Years Time?”_. The central point of Vivek’s article was well summarised in his introduction: “The harsh reality is that if you are middle-aged, write computer code for a living, and earn a six-figure salary, you’re headed for the unemployment lines. [Read More]

Another week and during my internet travels I stumbled upon a blog post by Aditya Bhargava titled “Building a concurrent web scraper with haskell”. I’m not a Haskell programmer and my experience of it is extremely limited. Reading the post most of it read like a cryptic magic spell! Anyway it was still an interesting read and has inspired me to try my hand at writing something similar. So I reached out and and the quickest thing to hand was Python. [Read More]

There are many things that sound great in principle, and sometimes a few of those things can even work out in practice. These rare gems should be shared with others right? People like to spread the good word. In time though the idea gets jumbled with other things. In its new corrupted form things stop working “in practice”. However the old stories live on, an affirmation that it is still a great idea. [Read More]

You may have come across this form of questioning most likely in an interview. Its a classic question but usually asked in terms of 5 year projection, however the concept are the same. The problem with well worn questions are that the answers mostly follow in a predictable manner. If you have never given this question any serious thought, then I suspect you would be in the majority. So why is this question so popular among interviews anyway? [Read More]

That dreaded email the one you was hoping would never turn up in your inbox has now suddenly popped up. You re-read the communication just to be sure of the exact details. Although you would love to just ignore it, this is one you can not. You have written your reply for the last time, but you hesitate to hit the send button. “Let me reword that again” you think to yourself, the dilemma is do you tell the truth? [Read More]