I went to a job interview recently. I had applied for a role in a team that worked on technically interesting projects, and they were very keen on the use of agile methodologies. From my first impressions, it looked an ideal place to work. I thought I made a very good impression on technical part … Continue reading Using Pair Programming as an Excuse for Mandatory Overtime →

In one of those strange examples of synchronicity, I managed to attend two different geek meetups in London on the same night; one was planned (XTC), and the other was a pleasant surprise (London 2.0). The initial meet-up I went to was the Extreme Tuesday Club (XTC), which is held in the Old Bank of … Continue reading XTC and London 2.0 →

I've been doing a lot of work around encryption lately. One of the tasks involved creating a dialog allowing the user to enter their password for encryption or decryption. One feature I put on this dialog was a "mask password" checkbox. When checked, the password appears as asterisks, meaning the people near the person are … Continue reading Unmask Password →

My CV (or resume - call it what you will) has been by far the biggest bandwidth resource on my website - by a factor of 4! It didn't help that it was a pdf file weighing in at over 400Kb. I have since converted this document to use semantic html, meaning that it is … Continue reading CVs and Findability →

This is just an advance warning that access to exubero.com may be patchy over the next couple of days, as I move house. Against all best practices for hosting arrangements, I actually serve the exubero.com website from a computer at my home. This is very flexible and cheap for me, as I can point the … Continue reading Moving Hosting Location →

After a 6 year hiatus from C++ (doing mainly Java), I've finally jumped back into doing some C++ development using Microsoft Visual Studio. I was quite keen to see how the development environments compare after some many years away. In summary, I was severely disappointed. A bit of background: I was a long time user … Continue reading Refactoring Editors →

Tonight, I'm off to try my first experience of the Extreme Tuesday Club. I've been meaning to get along for a long time, especially after attending XPDay 5 last year (which is organised by the XTC), but Doug Clinton finally gave me a good excuse to turn up.

Thanks to a tip off from the Java Posse last month, I started investigating the Java Black Belt certification community site. In the past, I've been sceptical of certification processes, as I believed that my CV was a better and more accurate indication of my skills than than anything that a certification could say about … Continue reading Java Black Belt →

This is a recurring problem I have: trying to explain my aversion to the Singleton Pattern (hereby re-christened the Singleton Anti-pattern). I've finally tracked down a number of links that explain the issue. There have been a few articles written over the years, but these are my favourites: Singleton Considered Stupid Use your Singletons Wisely … Continue reading Singletons are Evil →

Here's a few random updates about what I've been doing with Exubero... My blog finally has a picture of me on it. I spent about an hour playing around in the Gimp, and thought that the result looked pretty neat. However, my wife couldn't stop laughing at it, so I guess it's back to the … Continue reading Exubero Update →