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The Science of Computing and the Engineering of Software
Is computing science? is software engineering? the answers Tony Hoare argues must be the same! In the extremes: Scientist Scientist interested in the long term and scientific truth which has no finite lifetime. Idealism, general theories and certainty (theory supported by multiple items of evidence) separate of work into individual elements which can be formulized…
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Ruby on Rails
Not having the time to code in Java as i once did, i thought that i decided that it was about time to have a go at a new language. I selected Ruby and the Rails framework as i had enjoyed the debate i had at QCon and felt that it would help me understand…
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QCon inspired Rubiks cude solving
I attended QCon a few weeks back and Gregor Hohpe of Google was the host of the Architecture track. This ended with a panel and each had a Rubik’s cube, only Gregor got anywhere near solving it; i think he could have done it if he had any time to look at it. Anyway, for…
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QCon – One week on
Ive been back in the office for 1 week, so how has QCon helped. Conversation around cloud computing has been a big hit. I got some good contacts and these have lead to investigation on using the Elastic computing and S3 services from amazon for one of our clients. Thoughts from ‘ The Zen of…
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QCon – How good was QCon 2008?
In short fantastic. I’ve attended many larger conferences and I found the smaller size more enabling for communication, both with the speakers and conference attendees. I attended tutorials on Agile management and DSL’s (Domain Specific Languages) and followed tracks on cloud computing, effective design and architectures. Each of these had a great set of speakers…
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QCon day 5 – Ruby panel discussion
After a number of comments around the conference regarding the near fanatical religious nature of the guys on the Ruby stream, i had to attend. I was not disappointed. If you broke the panel down into individuals i believe you would get a very balanced discussion around the sessions subject, When is Rails an appropriate…
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QCon day 5 – End Panel with a tired Rod Johnson
Poor Rod Johnson had obviously been up all night working on his Java One slides (there was a deadline on the 14th) . He looked completely exhasted and near drifted off to sleep at some moments; obviously a little bored with some of the subjects or answers the panel were giving. However, even through this,…
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QCon day 5 – BNP Paribas Architecture
A fascinating talk, or maybe a tutorial on how the world of market risk works within BNP Paribas . By outlining clearly the problem space and problems faced by IT departments in the banking world;procurement and strategic sign-off and procurement. You got a good feel for how the architecture came together. In this case i…
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QCon day 5 – The BBC, DRM and video
It was interesting to hear about the problems the BBC has in identifying the location of requests in order to both serve advertisements and apply DRM. We tend to forget that the BBC gets a near set amount of money with which to work, so spending money serving content outside the UK for nothing would…
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QCon day 5 – how is ebay architected
Its been interesting to listen to speakers, each of which portraits the strategies and principles and this time was the turn of Randy Shoup. His four strategies for architectures for scale. Partition everything ASync everywhere Automate everything Remember everything fails Around these points he very clearly showed pattens ebay have implemented and how these directly…