The moral of today's story - be careful what you wish for.
Brain Overload!
Apologies for the interruption to your service
Update on events
Just a quick note to say I was interviewed for another podcast (Update 2020: apparently no longer available), again to talk about all-female events. It's only a short one and there's probably not much in there that I haven't said before, either on here or in person.
From the 21st May, I'm at GOTO, both Copenhagen and Amsterdam. I'll be talking about code & the Disruptor, thank goodness, and will be trying not to rant about the subject of women in technology. If you see me there, come and say hello!
On Friday 25th May, after all the GOTO craziness, I'm going to repeat the Disruptor presentation in Rotterdam at 010DEV, an event rather fantastically called "The Disruptor and the Perfect Programmer", which someone on Twitter correct noted sounds like a fairy tale.
After all that, I'm hopefully going to take June off to play Diablo 3 and Prototype 2, and read the next Game of Thrones book. All these joys I have been denying myself to make sure I get everything sorted in time for next week.
What I Did On My Holidays
And now, a post for my long-neglected, less technical readers.
I took a week off in July to try and avoid that Oh My God I Missed Summer Again feeling. Granted, it's easy to get that in the UK even if you're not stuck in an office the entire time.
Really this is just an excuse to post some photos on the blog.
In answer to one of the search terms which led to my blog…
..."what do female programmers look like":
Well, sometimes...
If there are any girl programmers out there who are interested in being part of a montage showing who we are, I'd be dead (see what I did there...?) interested in putting us all on one page. And not just because I'm narcissistic. Although that helps.
Cyclist tribes
Living and working in central London, you quickly learn that the fastest way around town is to cycle.
My extensive research into this activity has shown there are a number of different cycling tribes. Of course, I have split them into the two groups that are most appropriate to me: 1) slower than me and 2) faster than me. You can probably tell what sort of a cyclist I am by my attitude to the two groups.
Amazing!
Today, I found my own blog useful. I was configuring Spring validation on my new project, and had to remind myself how to do it. We configured validation on the new project in less than an hour, which beats the two days it took me to work out how to do it the first time.
And I impressed one of my new work collegues. Apparently I am now the Spring Guru. Oooops.
Agile Infection Growing
This is a bloody good idea. It builds upon my own Virgoen tendancies to write lists and tick things off, but what the list model lacks is the "in progress" state. Plus occasionally my lists get confused. See today's notebook page:
QCon: Initial thoughts
Things I took out of QCon:
- I want to play with Ajax. Maybe I've "grown out" of front end development but that doesn't prevent it from being (potentially) extremely cool
- Selenium looks like a good place to start for automated website testing
- It can take up to 7 years to move away from a legacy architecture. Depressing, but at least it shows it can be done and it's worth the effort
- I'm going to become a certified Scrum
MasterMistress. I believe Agile in some form or other is the most efficient way to run software development, but there are a LOT of lessons to learn in order to get it right. And number one lesson is you need the right team.