Strangelights

AngelHack Paris is the first “hack day” I have every attended, so I didn’t really know what to except. Early on Saturday morning I found myself in a slightly run down area just outside the “peripherique” road that marks the boundary of Pairs. The event was hosted at “cifacom” a colleague for digital design and art, I was quite sure what to make to their campus, about half seemed to swish lectures theaters and the rest seemed to have been basically left as the old warehouse that it was before it is was converted.

Last Wednesday I got the chance to attend a “Coding Breakfast” hosted by Damien Thouvenin of CLT Services. The concept is simple, turn up a little before 8:30, enjoy some coffee and croissant, then we attempt a Coding Kata for about an hour and finally we get together to review the results. I was pleased to see the great and the good of the Paris coding scene there, in the form of Yann Schwartz and Jérémie Chassaing.

The 2013 edition of Functional Programming eXchange is just over a month away, so if you’re not already signed up now the time to do so. When we first started Functional Programming eXchange back in 2009 there were very few functional programming conference’s aimed at developers, over years this has changed quite dramatically and now even if we just talk about about functional programming events in the UK hosted at Skills Matter we have Clojure eXchange, Haskell eXchange, Progressive F#, Scala Days and Scala eXchange. What makes Functional Programming eXchange different from these other conferences is that rather than focus on a specific functional programming language we have the freedom to bring together the talks from a broad range of functional languages, to bring there respective communities together to swap ideas and it gives us a chance to include some talks from languages that do not yet have there own conferences.

Today I gave a talk ”Science and Software Development” at the weactuallybuildstuff.com. The talk was largely inspired by Ben Goldacre’s “Bad Science” column and book and try to apply some of the ideas relating to the use and abuse of evidence in the software industry. In the talk I tried to build a case for why the software industry might by to pay more attention to scientific techniques, such as “Randomized Controlled Trails”, by talking about availability bias, Confirmation Bias, the placebo effect and overconfidence. The slides are available on SlideShare:

Well we're doing it again!

I've been running a conference "Functional Programming eXchange" in London for a few years now. The conference is run by Skills Matter and will take place on Friday 15th Mar 2013.

Visual Studio 2012 has been out for a while now, I’ve been using it every day at work and I’m generally very happy with it. The biggest win is the performance, which is some much better than VS2010.

Things are changing at Microsoft (or maybe they changed a while ago and it took me all this time to notice). The short story is the company no longer cares whether you use their development tools, they only care that you target their platforms: Windows 8 and Windows Azure.
 
The result is this, Microsoft is in the process of opening up Software Development tool chain. They no longer see themselves as the owners of .NET, or at perhaps more accurately some of the technologies around .NET (i.e. ASP.NET, Entity Framework which are now fully open source and parts of ASP.NET are packaged with Mono). Instead they seem themselves as driving contributor with other contributions from the community and other development companies. It can be seen too in the way that Microsoft has contributed to other projects to help bring them to the Microsoft platform, Node.js and the choice of Hadoop for its default Map/Reduce tool are probably the most prominent examples for this. This new way of doing thinks can also be seen in the way they released TypeScript, full open source and integrated with other Javascript open source projects.