Month: March 2014

Converting Blogger to Markdown

I’ve been using Blogger happily for three years or so, since I migrated the blog from LiveJournal and decided to actually invest some time writing. I’m happy with it because I just type stuff into Blogger and It Just Works. I’m happy because I can use my Google credentials to sign in. I’m happy because … Read more

QCon London 2014

Wow. My 4th QCon London. That’s not bad. And every time, it’s a different experience (if you must, see my blogs for 2013, 2012, and even 2007 (part 1 & part 2 – how cute was I? "agile seems like a jolly good idea; automated testing appears to be important")). I can’t even tell you … Read more

The Joy of Coding

I’m on a plane (there’s a surprise) on my way back from The Joy of Coding. It’s the title that attracted me to this conference, and it was a great little one day event with awesome people like Dan North, Erik Meijer and Dick Wall presenting. What I liked about the themes is they were broadly technology agnostic, pulling back to a level which made me remember why I’m a developer. It inspired me to do more research and more thinking, and less panicking and trying to write code. That might seem odd, as someone who goes to as many conferences as I do should get loads more research and thinking time than most developers living under the whip, but I seem to spend so much time bouncing from thing to thing I don’t get space to just sit and think, or to read things in any depth.

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