Life Beyond Fife

Engineering from the glorious Kingdom

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essays•

Expert or Generalist?

"My Name is Karl, Ich Bin Expert" I don't quote Karl Hungus lightly. When I began this blog back in the summer of 2011 it was because I thought I'd let my programming skills go rusty. I wasn't starting projects and I hadn't learned any significantly different technology or tools for a few years. Life Beyond Fife existed as a dumping ground for random ideas, quick trials and elaborate "Hello world!" examples. But I'm not a twenty-three year old entrepreneur living in The Bay trying to get a startup off the ground. However cool it is to launch a micro...

5 min readRead more →
essays•

Curiosity Killed The Productivity

"Where is that drip coming from?" Recently while in the staff kitchen, waiting a few minutes for my mug of tea to properly infuse - yes, I am that British - my absent minded thoughts were distracted by a repeating sound. \drip\ ...pause... \drip\ ...pause... I looked over at the sink. \drip\ Nothing fell from the tap faucet (Ok, I'm British but most of my readers are American). So where is it coming from, I thought? I turned around and moved within the space of the kitchen trying to get a more localised area of where the source sound originated....

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Designing your wedding ring with 13 year old code
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Designing your wedding ring with 13 year old code

So often when faced with a programming task, you never truly solve the required problem from scratch. To be completely pedantic you're not writing processor instructions or even assembler but rather high level programming commands that are compiled or interpreted depending on your language choice. But with more and more tools available today to make the job easier, a lot of the necessary knowledge and skills aren't so much about how to programmatically break down and solve problems - it's just as much about knowing how to use all the tools out there. I love it when I've developed with...

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XML Serialisation
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XML Serialisation

Recently at work I was confronted by a problem requiring data persistance outside of a database - in this case, a saved parameter project file. Though I'm a convert to the purity and ease of use of JSON, in the land of Enterprise coding, XML is still very much king. Visual Studio provides many tools for not just dealing with XML files but also XSD files: a schema for describing a valid XML source file. Both while at work in creating configuration files, and at home in parsing Amazon's RESTful API results returned in XML data, I've written code to...

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Idea A Day

Perhaps the one constant in becoming an expert in any particular craft is to do it regularly - preferably daily. For some disciplines e.g. skydiving and marathon running, this is prohibitive by being expensive or physically extreme. There are countless other more attainable skills, however, that demand only our time. The purpose of this blog - for me at least - is to provide a place for thoughts on software development in practice and the implementation of ideas. So often it becomes the natural place to trial a new technology but at the heart of every technology is the idea...

23 min readRead more →
The Difference Between Mean and Median
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The Difference Between Mean and Median

As a non-statistician who every now and then has to understand statistical concepts as if they were second nature, illustrative examples are like gold dust to me. I thought I'd share a small yet extreme sample set that I devised to aid me in understanding the difference between the first statistical moment, the mean, and the similar yet potentially wildly contrasting median. My problem with mathematical definitions Before I present my example, I'm going to get on my soapbox for a minute about the way some, often simple, mathematical concepts are taught. Skip to the next section if this is...

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