I am still alive but I’ve not really dedicated much time to blogging this year. Last Friday was my last day at Evolving Media. I enjoyed my time at EM, and they produce some quality work but I really want to move on to using more robust development practices. Namely using a versioning system again, when I first started there it felt a little bit like walking a tight rope without a safety net with no SVN. Read the rest of this entry »

This post is somewhat overdue since I’ve never been so busy. I don’t post much in the way of personal happenings on here but it’s not every month you move out of home.

It’s been a long time coming, and for years I swore to myself I’d always buy and never rent a property, but since no one really has any idea if house prices will keep going up or crash, I bit the bullet and moved into rented accommodation with a friend on March 1st!

It’s a nice feeling to have your own place, even if I don’t actually own it. Right now I can’t actually envisage getting the free time I had back. Hopefully in a month or two I’ll have sorted things out and got into some kind of routine.

I write this sitting on the floor at the end of my mattress while I wait for my new desk and bed to arrive (several weeks away, sigh).

I do have a couple of posts saved in drafts but I’ve spent more time washing up in recent weeks than I have on my PC. What time I do have I’m trying to spend revising for my Zend Certification which I’ve got to get around to taking, seeing as I paid for it last August!

I can’t believe I never stumbled across this before; I’ve seen a few posts about Groovy on dzone.com previously and just ignored them. A couple of weeks ago however I bother to investigate this language – how I wish I’d done this earlier!
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It’s hard to drag a community the size of PHP’s towards such things as standards and using frameworks. From my experience many PHP developers still struggle/refuse to adopt others standards.

When I started PHP, PEAR didn’t exist, and even when it did (and probably even today) much of community is used to “rolling their own” solutions for 99% of tasks. Most developers I’ve worked with don’t trust/use PEAR classes and I can’t really blame them. Most early efforts were authored by developers who at the time didn’t really grasp the OO concept and made god classes. Read the rest of this entry »

This was meant to be a lengthy comparison of the stumbling blocks I found learning Java having come from PHP. However learning Java is currently on the back burner so I thought I’d post what I have anyway. Read the rest of this entry »

This is not something many web developers run up against, but for those with a spare hour, Channel9 has an insightful interview with some researchers from Microsoft Research Cambridge who explain their new solution for dealing with transactions and parallelism.

The recent introduction of multi-core processors this year has really pushed concurrency into the limelight of the software development community. With it attention has been drawn to functional programming, reasons for which are described here.