I love reddit. I’ve been a member for over five years now, ever since the exodus from Digg. It’s changed and it’s stayed the same. But it’s scary to see the shift now, and I’m not talking about the user revolt. Continue reading »

This is my 250th blog post. Admittedly it’s taken me 9 years to get here and a fifth of those posts have been made in the last 50 days, but it’s a nice milestone and another excuse to be a bit meta. Continue reading »

Being a developer is a pretty solitary occupation. You can work in an office full of devs, but ultimately you’re writing code in your own little world (unless you’re pair programming, but that’s a discussion for another day). Continue reading »

Last night, while sitting around watching others play FIFA, a friend was filling in a passport application form for another friends brother. We’ll leave issues of what makes someone of good standing in their community to a later date, but they were stumped when it needed said friends passport number. His passport was sitting several miles away at his parents house with little chance of recovery. Until I remembered I had all of his personal information on my phone. Continue reading »

I was looking through an image gallery recently, of foreign words that have no singular counterpart in the English language. As a developer, names are one of the most important axioms of any program, so it’s always fascinating to see entire concepts rolled up and packaged in a few scratches on a bit of paper. Which reminded me of my family’s own lexicon. Continue reading »

I had a nice blog post planned for today. Bit of recent news, a few quotes, discussion worthy. And then I lost my morning dealing with support requests. Warning; rant ahead. Continue reading »

Last night was the third Dev Curry I’ve been to. If the name didn’t give it away, it’s just a bunch of local geeks (mainly web) meeting up to chat and eat. Continue reading »

This is a short post. One, because it’s late on a Sunday evening and I have a load of things to do. And two, I’ve just got back from Snowdon (via Welshpool, Shrewsbury and the worst motorway network in the world). Continue reading »

I’ve tried to avoid any meta posts, but I need at least one. This post marks three weeks, 21 continuous days, of blogging. Not even when I was posting movie reviews did I manage this frequency. I don’t know what’s kept me going, and I especially don’t know if I can keep going. Continue reading »

Years back, when I was still in school and looking for a Summer job, I filled in for a temp position at my (now) uncle’s paint factory. It was a good wage, primarily because I was a desperate student and agency temps are more expensive. Each day I would arrive at 7am, push giant plastic bath tubs full of sheets of resin-like paint to a big grinding machine and collect the boxes of ground up paint it spat out the other end. Continue reading »