AngelHack Paris is the first “hack day” I have every attended, so I didn’t really know what to except. Early on Saturday morning I found myself in a slightly run down area just outside the “peripherique” road that marks the boundary of Pairs. The event was hosted at “cifacom” a colleague for digital design and art, I was quite sure what to make to their campus, about half seemed to swish lectures theaters and the rest seemed to have been basically left as the old warehouse that it was before it is was conv[...]

Last Wednesday I got the chance to attend a “Coding Breakfast” hosted by Damien Thouvenin of CLT Services. The concept is simple, turn up a little before 8:30, enjoy some coffee and croissant, then we attempt a Coding Kata for about an hour and finally we get together to review the results. I was pleased to see the great and the good of the Paris coding scene there, in the form of Yann Schwartz and Jérémie Chassaing. The chosen Kata was the “Parking Meter” problem. Create a function to calculate how much [...]

The 2013 edition of Functional Programming eXchange is just over a month away, so if you’re not already signed up now the time to do so. When we first started Functional Programming eXchange back in 2009 there were very few functional programming conference’s aimed at developers, over years this has changed quite dramatically and now even if we just talk about about functional programming events in the UK hosted at Skills Matter we have Clojure eXchange, Haskell eXchange, Progressive F#, Scala Days and Sca[...]

Today I gave a talk ”Science and Software Development” at the weactuallybuildstuff.com. The talk was largely inspired by Ben Goldacre’s “Bad Science” column and book and try to apply some of the ideas relating to the use and abuse of evidence in the software industry. In the talk I tried to build a case for why the software industry might by to pay more attention to scientific techniques, such as “Randomized Controlled Trails”, by talking about availability bias, Confirmation Bias, the placebo effect and o[...]

Well we're doing it again!   I've been running a conference "Functional Programming eXchange" in London for a few years now. The conference is run by Skills Matter and will take place on Friday 15th Mar 2013.   The idea of the conference is to bring together London's diverse functional programming communities to share ideas and war stories. Most previous talks have focus on concepts from functional programming or feedback from projects that have used functional programming. Previous talks can be seen on l[...]