When I write software, I like to thing of myself to be a craftsman. Taking the time and patience to write clean, logical and hopefully bug free code. In my spare time I like to make things with wood, metal and electronics. Whilst learning this second skillset I have learnt a lot that I believe we could be carrying into writing software. First thing is be patient, we are lucky to make things that have such a quick turn around from concept to prototype, it could be as simple as creating one file and hitting that run button.

A few days ago I stumbled upon a post somewhere that said about starting a log book for work so they could see where their time had been spent. I thought this was a neat idea so I took to starting my own. Problem is that even though a text or markdown file would have more than sufficed, I took this as an oportunity to learn some LaTeX. After an evening or so’s fiddling about, I am proud to show you the template for my logbook (which could easily be adapted into a diary):

Last Monday marked the first time I’ve done any real public speaking outside of the classroom. I was demoing a project that I’ve been working on this past month or two, a Scrum Management tool that enforces strict rules to help teams accomplish their goals. The event was a really nice atmosphere and I loved presenting. Hopefully in the coming months and events I will be able to show off some of my more fun projects like the telemetrics on my in progress robot or my phone app for sharing the clip board.

I recently updated my Ember CLI to version 2.13.2 and started a new project. I was greeted with erros because babel-lint wasn’t configured, firstly it was build errors that I cannot remember (or reproduce at the moment).But I was also getting linting errors because import is a reserved word, obviously this was obfusticating any actual errors from being displayed. I added this file to the root directory of my project and since then I’ve not had any issues with it, even when creating new projects.

I have finally managed to get my blog migrated from Statamic into Hugo. With the frequency with which I update my blog these days, having that full engine just seemed wasteful. Lets see how this pans out.

First off a quite update. I got two days into writing a new post every night and then had a small family emergency on the third night in so I put a temporary hold on them. I am starting them back up again now. Now for the fun bit. Problem Solving. This post is not all about the process of problem solving and the processes you can apply, it’s more about just using your brain.

Todays post is not code related but about the mentality with which I code at my optimal. Recently I have noticed when working that the size of my work list directly correlates to the speed with which I work. Basically if I have a short list I seem to work a lot more slowly than if I have long list. This problem doesn’t exist for me when working in proper sprints because I have a deadline and know when I am about to get more work.

Hello everyone! From today I am going to start trying to write a blog post every day. Even if it’s just a small paragraph or two. I’m doing this so that I can have a sort of journal and to get back into the habbit of blogging the fun experiments I get up to, both with writing software and fiddling with hardware. There will be frequent updates to my website as I start to get more into developing this as a thing.

I’ve been pretty lapse in writing posts for this blog in the past year! I’ve also had my first child, the two seem to go hand in hand! I want to take up weekly posts again, but I think fortnightly (every two weeks for you Americans) will be a more achievable goal. The posts will mostly be about programming still but now with a healthy dose of DIY. Thank you for the continued reading!

I’ve been using Atom since way back in the Beta mainly as an alternative to Sublime Text because I didn’t get on with the way Sublime handles packages and add ins. I have used Atom to write a lot of different languages: C#, C, C++, javascript, HTML, CSS, PHP, Erlang and LISP to name a few. Atom handled all of the language formatting plugins without blinking. A while ago I wrote an Erlang UDP Server with SFML and C++ as a UDP client.