Posts tagged with "essay"

  • The Republic of Virtue: Terror, Tolerance and the Internet

    I’ve recently been listening to the excellent podcast series Revolutionsby Mike Duncan. Right now we are in the thick of the French Revolution. It’s really riveting stuff, and offers some fascinating insights into the interplay of groups, ideology, virtue, violence and terror. If that list sounds familiar, perhaps you frequent Twitter or Reddit or some other online community. Detail from a painting of the execution of Robespierre Ah, the Internet - the defining technology of the new Information Age.

  • The Programmer Dad

    I’ve not typed a semicolon for a couple of weeks now. I don’t mean the look-at-me-I-know-fancy-punctuation kind (there will be plenty of those here). I am of course referring to ;, the token that denotes the end of a statement. No, I’ve not ditched JavaScript for Python or Erlang; I’m on holiday. I’m getting back to (half of) my roots in beautiful Malaysia, and as a result I’ve not done any programming at all.

  • One Year of GitHub and Open Source

    Next week sees the close of my first year as an active participant on GitHub and in the open source community. I’d like to mark the occasion by collecting together a few thoughts on my experience thus far. At the beginning of this year I wrote about my decidedly shaky start in the world of professional software development in the essay Confessions of an Intermediate Programmer. For those who have read the sorry tale, it’ll come as little surprise that it was only fairly recently that I started using any kind of version control system.

  • What Makes A Good Tech Talk?

    When I moved to Vienna last October, I was pleased to find a very active and vibrant development community. Just this week alone, there have been at least 19 tech meetups in the city. A quick search on meetup.com reveals 46 tech-related meetup groups at the time of this writing, and there’s even a website dedicated to listing all the meetups each week. During my time here so far, I’ve found the local tech meetups a great way to learn and improve as a developer, as well as a way to get involved in the community and get to know some cool people in a new city.

  • Confessions of an Intermediate Programmer

    I am an intermediate programmer. I have a pretty good grasp of the basics. I have made enough mistakes to have a good idea why they were mistakes. I am aware that there is a lot that I need to know more about. Crucially, I have some idea of what those things are, and I am actively and energetically working on improving. It has taken a while for me to get to the point where I am confident enough to admit that I am only average in ability.