(I wonder what percentage of blog posts are of the type “Sorry I have’t blogged much recently but my uber exciting life has got in the way”?)

Why so silent? I have to admit, the cat’s got my tongue. I still have things I want to say but I didn’t know if I should, could or how, then I became rusty and lost my voice. It’s a vicious cycle of over thinking.

A cat - no tounge

There are many reasons why the blogging stopped, some of which need explaining.

The company I work for has embraced social media, mainly twitter but there are also some spiffing YouTube videos out there with backing tracks that IN NO WAY resemble 1970s porn music.

As you no doubt know I’m rather fond of crafting the odd tweet, but should I interact with the corporate twitter accounts – accounts talking about one of the most important things in my life, our product family? What if a client sees me retweeting something important, looks at my feed and realises that, yes, my guilty secret is occasionally watching XFactor and tweeting about it? Or my amdram obsession? Would YOU let your mission critical software be written by a person who obsessively posts pictures of food?

Or, would you rather engage a company who employs faceless drones? Is it better to just not know?

Should we be as professional as we would be in a client meeting at all times, or does that come across as dull and, at worst, fake? That’s certainly an attribute you never want to have in people you employ.

I have always been of the opinion that you should never put anything online that you wouldn’t say to anyone face-to-face. This was a pretty good rule of thumb in the 90s when everyone wasn’t hyper-connected but now, everything feels much more traceable.

As an example, let’s say I post a tweet linking to a photo in my flickr stream, the previous photo was of me out with friends, one of which is tagged, the client follows that tag to the other persons flickr stream, and then there’s a picture of me in their stream doing something not development related like, oh I don’t know, drinking? Dancing? Playing video games? In a church?  Basically doing – well, anything that isn’t development – and potentially something that the viewer finds offensive.

I don’t feel the need to keep my life a secret, or anything I do – if I do it, well, it’s me, take all of me or none of me – even if that means accepting that I’ve sat in classy bars knitting….

But what if this picture of a complete person ever reflects back badly on my employers rather wonderful product?

(Warning: this next paragraph may not be fashionable, it certainly isn’t cool and it may even make you a little nauseous.)

I adore my company’s product. Our main product is spectacularly powerful – (working) life changingly powerful. It can revolutionise oganisations. I truly do not know how people live day to day without it – or something like it. And I never want to reflect badly on it.

When I was employed about in April 2005 employers only needed to worry about their employees during the working day. As long as they turned up, looked smart, worked hard, and didn’t do something so spectacuarly stupid that they end up in the tabloids and brought the company into disrepute everything was peachy. Now employer’s have to consider their people’s online identities. Or do they? And should they?

So, I’ve been quiet, trying not to scare off that most timid of beasts – the new corporate account runners, but enough is enough.

I am not just a developer, I am a whole person.

I live, love, cook, dream – and I’m back.

Slightly odd Hobby 1

Three things that might cause offence – Church, Drinking and an unhealthy love of spreadsheets – take it or leave it!

I am learning Python between times – I’m becoming rather fond of the language I must say, more of that another time.

Gadget update: I love my sony ereader, this holiday is really showing it’s worth from a weight-saving point of view only.

But as much as I love my ereader, it’s not a patch on how devoted the parents are to their kindles! Every time we sit down to have a coffee, beer or to look at a view, they wipe them out and start reading. I would recomend them for distracting oldies on long flights!

Yes, yes… but it’s fun.

I am back from an extremely interesting weekend at Developer Developer Developer South West – a day long tech conference loosely based about .NET technologies.

Now as you may know, I’m a php developer – so what on earth was I doing there?

I’ve never been snobby about languages, they are means to an end – producing a product that does what it needs to do, and making the world a better place. How you get there isn’t really important to anyone other than the development team, so no, just because I haven’t touched .Net in years didn’t worry me, I was sure I would still get something out of the non-.net-specific sessions – and I did.

Another reason was to feed my secret geeky need to revel in the way different people approach things – why do people from one technology stack approach problems in a certain way? And what do they do that I and the world I live in don’t, and is it better? What Can I Pillage?

Also, I thought it would be fun – I ended up at the pre-drinks for DDD Reading a year or so ago and they seemed like a good crowd. The DDDSW people were charming, intelligent individuals happy to have their brains picked by anyone.

It was a remarkably valuable day. We are all working in the same industry, we all have the same goals – to produce solutions that are as good as we can possible make them within the constraints time, money and clients give us – and the knowledge and insights shared will stay with me for a while.

So, thoughts?

I’m about to open my code editor for the first time today – I’m not sure if I’m going to run screaming from the room crying “My eyes! My eyes!” when I see it, or roll around in my beloved php code like a dog in a muddle puddle happy to be home.

Will I be abandoning my first true love of PHP and embracing the .Net goodness? Not this week. But I have a project ‘radiator’ already doodled down and I’m eyeing up that blank wall behind me for potential kanban goodness. I’ve just been on a book buying rampage on O’Reilly and I’m pretty sure I’ll be using jQuery templates within the next few days.

Either way, I know I’ll never look at code in quite the same way again – I’m blaming the Test Driven Development session for that. Thinking about tests before you write the code and hence letting that guide your code design was the biggest Aha! moment of the day.

So I say this to you my friends, go forth and meet your fellow developers, no matter their platform, language or workflow – we need to share our ideas, our philosophies and our passion. And drink beer.

Just Posted: Grown Up Chocolate Cake

Luckily he liked it!

When your life is full of social media, keeping a secret is hard – I’ve been knitting this scarf since before Christmas and finished it at 3:20am on 2nd April. 2011. In that time I haven’t been able to mention it online at all incase he heard about it – we’re both active twitter users, we’re both friends on facebook, we subscribe to each other’s blog RSS (don’t you Ben…?).

And of course I had  to instruct all our mutual friends to not say a word online either.

As someone that tells the world what I’m doing, keeping a big project like this under wraps has not been easy! But also quite an interesting experiment. Occatioanlly I would tweet about what percentage I had left – courtesy of my spreadsheet

The scarf itself was made from a pattern on the http://www.doctorwhoscarf.com site – the “original”, which is one of the shorter patterns available - remember when I started this project I could hardly knit! Oh I can now… if you ever want to learn how to knit, this is the project for you!

There was 1042 rows in the scarf, with 60 stitches across – a total of 62,520 stitches.

As I’m a slow knitting this took about 3 minutes a row (that’s 3 seconds a stitch allowing to turning etc), so that means this took just over 52 hours – and that’s without sewing in the ends, blocking and the tassels!

As I had wool left over I made a scaled down version for Darren, he seemed bemused which is exactly the reaction I want when I give someone something, which quite frankly, lets face it – it crazy.

My thanks to my mother and Katharine ‘The Sorceress’ for helping me knitting part of it!

I hope that Ben enjoys his scarf and wears it to many-a-geeky event, or just snuggled on the sofa at home watching the latest series.

Am I ever going to make something this large again? Oh yes – well, I want one for myself!

No. Simply put. I’ve been busy.

You’re always busy I hear you cry… alright, I’ve been up to something. Three somethings infact. But I can’t tell you about them yet… I will do though.

The other reason is http://onecrumbshort.co.uk – yes, I’ve finally created a cooking blog with a good friend of mine. You can find out about it over there. I shall be re-working the recipes on here and copying them over to there in the coming months. Which means I can use this blog for it’s original intention – musings on the techie side of my life, without food getting in the way.

Will this place be a food-free zone? Oh I think not, as Dorcus said, “Food is my one weakness”

So what HAVE I been doing?

Went to Bletchly park

Had BBQs with my friends

Bought a new tea pot

Bought a new camera

Had a craving for boiled condensed milk and blondies – and like all good cravings, it must be given into!

And fell truly, madly, deeply in love with PHPUnit testing. Where have you been all my life?!

Katharine kindly told me the recipe and one day I will create it properly but not today, today involved rain, two 2-hour meetings, crazy access right problems, several changes in specification and some sort of hideous problem with setting up the development environment.

So today I made up a tribute to Katharine’s dish.

And it was GOOD!

Ingredients:

• Tin of coconut milk
• Red Thai Curry Paste
• Two frozen fish fillets – I had cod
• Half a large potato
• Fresh Coriander
• Rice

Method:

1. Put a tablespoon or so of the curry paste into a saucepan over a medium heat, let it sizzle a bit
2. Add tin of coconut milk
3. Get your fish fillets out of the freezer
4. I only used half a potato but you could use more if you wanted – cut the potato into cubes
5. Add potato to the bubbling coconut milk
6. Give it about 7-9 minutes till the potato is softish
7. Add the fish fillets
8. Leave it bubbling – not too madly – for, oo, 7 ish minutes
9. When you can’t resist it any longer poke at the pan to break up the fish a bit
10. Give it a taste – more curry paste? I thought so too, stick it in.
11. Stick the rice into the microwave (Yes, I use microwave rice, sticky rice would work very well with this though if you know how to do it)
12. Pass a knife though a small bunch of coriander a couple of times to vaguely chop it
13. Put done rice into a bowl, spoon fish and potatoes over the top then pour over the sauce
14. Put fresh coriander on top and enjoy