Back in January I built a sample Pacman maze script in F# to use at a Pacman Kata evening with the F#unctional Londoners group. Coincidentally there’s another Coding Kata this Thursday 26th July at Skills Matter. Anyway a couple of weeks ago I started playing with the sample again on the train to and from work, filling in some of the gameplay. You can play the latest version with your cursor keys and 9 lives below: (Right click to ins[...]

You decide what happens in the developer community. You can vote with your feet by choosing which conferences and user group meetings you can turn up at. You can also vote with your mouse and decide which talks you’d like to hear all the way through to the new features you’d like to see in developer products. If you’re a .Net developer there are a lot of ways you can get involved with the community by voting with your feet and choosing which user group meetings you attend. These days you can vote for the [...]

On day 1 of the Progressive F# Tutorials in NYC on the beginner’s track we started with the F# Koans to introduce F#’s syntax and language features, and then finished up with F# Katas to put some of that learning into practice. On day 2 the idea was to look at how to structure F# programs through a tutorial on Domain-specific languages (DSLs) in F#, and finish up the day with a fun programming contest. DSLs Here are the slides, they’re a little sparse as most of the session was a hands-on tutorial wit[...]

Last week I flew out to New York for the Progressive F# Tutorials NYC hosted by Skills Matter and organised by Richard Minerich. The event was held in the atmospheric Liberty Hall event space at the Ace hotel in mid-town Manhattan, and not far from the Empire State Building. Keynote Don Syme kicked off proceedings with a keynote on Being Successful with Functional-first techniques in Finance (you can check out the video of a broadly similar talk at the Progressive .Net Tutorials in London). In the talk[...]

Definition of iconoclast from Wikipedia: An iconoclast is someone who engages in iconoclasm—destruction of religious symbols or, by extension, established dogma or conventions. Recently the GOTO Copenhagen conference had a track dedicated to Iconoclasts. Here’s my short list of Iconoclasts primarily on OOP & TDD with examples: Paul Graham: Revenge of the Nerds essay discussing the “industry best practice” misnomer Rich Hickey: Simple Made Easy talk at Strangeloop questioning TDD & Agile [...]