Hiring good developers is hard. It turns out, there just aren’t that many out there. Occasionally, you’ll get lucky. You’ll look further afield and find a pocket of clever people, but you’ll bring them all in on tasty salaries, only to find that they all clock off at five pm, or they want to re-write … Continue reading Hiring good developers
This is one of the prettiest things i’ve seen on the web in quite a while: Multicolr Search lab The team from Idée Inc. use Flickr’s API to generate a large corpus of ‘interesting’ images. Then they filter based on colour to show similar images. Further, their technology ‘Piximilar’ finds images that look like an … Continue reading Multicolr search
I recently did this, and it’s a little convoluted. I don’t have an external CD drive, or a >1Gb flash drive, so I thought I’d give netboot a go. Here’s what to do: On your ibook, start the tftp server: sudo /sbin/service tftp start Download and extract the pxe image to your tftp folder: wget … Continue reading Ubuntu Hardy Heron on Asus Aspire One via netboot from an iBook over wifi
A colleage recommended, last week, that I look at the Boo programming language. There are certainly some lovely features. I’ve been writing lots of F# recently, and have developed a great love of Type Inference. Similarly, lambdas (albeit fairly immature ones – they look like anonymous delegates from C# 2) and their logical offspring, first-class … Continue reading Boo: Niche programming languages
I want to explain a little about how things worked in a team I used to work for. I’ve been lucky enought to work with a few really great groups of people in my short career, so I think I’ve picked up a couple of hints. When I first started work in my job, I … Continue reading Low impact management
Everyone under the sun has done one of these, so I’m going to change tack a little. Two things I wish Hejlsberg would nick from F# for C# 4.0: Tuples – simple, ad-hoc types with members accessed by order rather than by name. Take the example of being able to return a host/port pair. In … Continue reading C# 4.0 Wishlist
From Don Syme’s F# blog: Wildart has released an F# extension for Monodevelop, allowing .NET developers on platforms other than Windows to embrace functional programming. This is great news! The F# team have worked hard to ensure Mono compatibility with the F# compiler, interpreter, and libraries, and it’s great to see that the Mono community … Continue reading F# on Monodevelop
I’m a .NET developer, and I work in a large financial institution in London. I don’t think I can reveal who I am, but I won’t be posting anything work specific anyway, so I’m not too worried about concealing my identity. Little Plastic Squares won’t be too much more than a collection of links and … Continue reading Little Plastic Squares