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coding•12 July 2012

Modular WPF Interfaces

Imagine a completely modularised approach to designing user interfaces. For instance, say you design a user interface with one or more bits left blank. You give said blank regions a name and rely on someone else to provide a DLL that populates that part of the window with something shiny and functional. The keener among you will be aware that this functionality has already been in existance for quite some time now. Indeed, I've just described every Firefox plug-in ever written. But the modular approach to user interface design is one every application should have, not just customisable systems with...

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essays•17 June 2012

Barrier To Entry

The greatest advert for being a software developer today is the low – practically non-existent – barrier to entry. Repeated falling hardware costs, the success of the open source software movement, and the proliferation of online help resources mean that practically any person, from any culture or background who has access to a computer and the internet can master the art and science of software development, or at the very least give it a go. And yet conversely that is its greatest weakness; why as a discipline it will never be taken seriously; and that we'll never receive the true...

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essays•5 May 2012

How I lost, and regained, my coding mojo

For as long as I can remember I've been programming and I never seriously thought about doing anything else for a living. But becoming and remaining a software developer is a journey, not a destination. See if you can identify with this situation: I worked for the same company for six years and though I kept up with the latest .Net changes as my job required ("LINQ eh, what's that?") I didn't really learn much new. By the end of my time there I realised things were far from right. It wasn't that I didn't know relevant technologies that propspective...

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follies•18 April 2012

New Music - Part I

Welcome back guys! Wow, it's really hard to get code out of the door when you've got to work full-time. Still, no matter, here is how I got on with my latest project: extending the previous one until it's bashed out into something a bit more useful. To give a bit more background on just what the previous blog post was about, it was an ASP application knocked up quickly over the course of a weekend to give me something to show for an interview I had with Scotland's premier web technology company, Skyscanner (setup via the awesome Quantum Recruitment...

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follies•6 April 2012

/Sabbatical

Just so you know, I am still alive... ...but the sabbatical finally had to come to an end. I'm very excited to enter the world of work once more. No really. ¬\¬ I'm sure my brand of proactive problem solving will have me going places soon enough... ...especially seeing as I'm no longer long-haired, bearded, nor a wearer of rock t-shirts, combats or skater shoes i.e. a typical software developer. I now own four suits. Four. Rest assured, now the upheaval of relocating and job hunting has ceased, blog posts shall once again resume. Possibly not at the rate of...

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follies•20 February 2012

A Restful Weekend

This is an amusing play-on-words type of blog post as I can't remember the last time I had a restful weekend. I'm simultaneously job hunting and flat hunting in Edinburgh from my base back in Fife (thanks Mum & Dad ;) with most of my stuff, half of my CDs and most importantly my guitar back in Cambridge \sigh\ No matter, I press on with a mini project for a RESTful web service using ASP.Net and WCF. A couple of weeks back I tweeted the following: The awesome rateyourmusic.com do have a section within a user's profile page that provides...

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