In the last week or so I've seen a popular article and a presentation which didn’t paint the rosiest of pictures for the next generation of coders: Marc Scott’s Kids Can't Use Computers... And This Is Why It Should Worry You Brett Victor’s The Future of Programming I have to agree with Marc Scott that the Information & Communication Technology (ICT) GCSE widely studied in the UK, with Microsoft Office as a focus, seems a bit of a step backwards. The Computer Studies O-level I remember from the m[...]

Last night I ran a free hands on Generative Art session to a full class room at Skills Matter for the F#unctional Londoners meetup group. We host a hands on programming sessions every month, next month we’ll return to the Machine Learning theme with Matt Moloney from the Tsunami IDE team. Generative Art Hands On with F# from ptrelford Samples: http://trelford.com/GenerativeArt.zip I recently picked up Matt Pearson’s Generative Art book published by Manning, his examples use the Processing programmi[...]

Developer conferences are a great way to learn about new and existing technologies. Almost as important are the conversations in the corridors between talks and bars after to find out what your peers from other companies are up to. Without them your company may run the risk of becoming like a small island cut off from the mainland, perpetuating a monoculture. But there are a bewildering array of conferences to choose from, and for most of us only a limited time and budget to work with. Here’s a few ti[...]

Skills Matter are excited to host the first ever New York GameCraft event on Friday 20th September at the DUMBO Loft! Following the phenomenal success and excitement around Dublin GameCraft, the event is now going global with a event also planned in London! GameCraft is a games jam event designed around building the gaming community. We aim to create events which allow game-makers to meet, share ideas, have fun, compete for prizes and most importantly make games. The events will be facilitated by Games exp[...]

Last weekend I set about mining all the links from Alvin Ashcraft's Morning Dew excellent link blog site which has been documenting .Net goings on since 2007. In the back of my mind was the idea of applying some machine learning techniques to automatically generate blog article recommendations using the labelled links as training data. Each link in Alvin's site has a date, category, title and author. I took 2 passes: programmatically find all the post urls parse the HTML posts using the HTML Agility [...]