All Geekness Great and Small

Archive for February 11th, 2009

My brother is an IT contractor in the UK and has just completed a series of four articles on his transition from the world of permanent work to that of contractual work. One of the interesting points he makes is that, with the downturn in the global economy, on of the main barriers to becoming a contractor (the lack of job security) has been significantly diminished as large companies start to fail and roll out massive layoffs.

The four articles can all be found at http://www.contractoruk.com or you can click to them from here:

1. Diary of a first time IT contractor – Making the jump
2. Diary of a first time IT contractor – Deciding how to trade
3. Diary of a first time IT contractor – The first day
4. Diary of a first time IT contractor – Lessons learnt

IBM Research have come up with a nice little toy called Wordle. You provide it with the URL of a blog or RSS feed and it generates a tag cloud, with the size of the words representing their prominence. Once the cloud has been generated, you’re free to tweak the word orientation and the colour scheme.

The cloud above represents my blog as of February 11 2009. Some others that may interest you:

BBC News

preDevCamp

The Daily WTF

On a number of occasions this weekend, while I was at the BLI Conference, I was asked the question: “Why are you doing the preDevCamp?” I thought it would be useful to provide an answer here.

With the ever increasing complexity of mobile telephones, we’re now carrying powerful computers around with us every. Unlike modern computers, the mobile phone has remained an arcane platform for programming. iPhone development requires a knowledge of Objective C. If you want to write for the Android, you’re stuck with Java. While these languages are hardly esoteric, they’re hardly an easy environment to use for creating simple applications.

I’m a firm believer that the greatest barrier to innovation should be imagination and not technology. The opening of the iPhone App Store presented the fruits of many a fertile mind; minds that had a good idea and coupled that with a sufficient understanding of Java to turn that idea into an app.

With the release of the Palm Pre, will come a new environment for developers. This environment is the webOS and applications will be based on HTML, CSS and Javascript. The number of developers who are comfortable with this development environment is vast, much greater than the number of Objective C developers. In addition to this, HTML and CSS are inherently visual languages, making te development of graphical interfaces well within the reach of the average coder.

I’m excited at the prospect of preDevCamps, because it’ll be an opportunity to see what developers can do when they are given the chance to spend their mental efforts on innovating instead of creating; the DevCamps will be run all around the world, bringing ideas together from cities ranging from Atlanta to Zagreb. Together, we’ll be able to demonstrate that the Palm Pre is a serious platform for developers and has a real place in market. Already, ideas are flowing on the discussion forums and we’ve only been going a week.

I urge anyone who is event the slightest bit interested in web development to take a serious look at the Palm Pre and joining a local preDevCamp. It’s a real opportunity to take the skills that you honed on the web and learn a brand new way to exercise them!