I went along to the Southampton Code Dojo on Thursday evening. I think it’s safe to say I was amongst the older attendees (most appeared to be undergrads or postgrads at the Uni although there was one guy who was sufficiently young to need his Mum to accompany him!). A pre-event poll had settled on Java as the language (Python had been outlawed as too popular and I guess Java was the lowest common denominator after that). Following pizza and beer there was another poll to select the challenge: the Countdown numbers game, before being numbered off in to groups. There were only three people in mine with one claiming no coding experience (despite being in the Computer Science department!). We spent far too long looking for an intelligent solution before doing the sums and deciding that brute force would suffice. My brain wasn’t entirely in gear (perhaps due to a day spent with the children?) and we didn’t manage to complete our solution before being timed out. We were in good company though with only one out of the six groups completing the exercise. It has reminded me that coding can actually be challenging in its own right (the challenge at work typically coming from legacy code, integration with other products, or simply politics).
Countdown Coding
August 16th, 2014Moors Valley
August 2nd, 2014
Percy the Park Keeper Trail
A visit to Moors Valley Country Park was on our hit list for the summer. We decided to show some faith in the forecast and set off from home in the rain. It was still threatening when we arrived so we decided to leave the bikes for a bit and I took the children round the ‘Percy the Park Keeper’ trail whilst Christine went for a run. An hour and a half later we finished the trail which must have been all of a mile and a half long but had twenty stops on the way with questions to fill out. Duncan carefully filled out his answers as well (thing he needs some practice on his numbers!).
We had lunch in one of the playgrounds and were eventually available to drag them away with the promise of the play trail. The sun was out in full force by this point and it was a very pleasant stroll through the woods with the children enjoying each piece of the equipment immensely. Once we got back there was just time for an ice cream before returning home, the bikes not having left the car! Duncan later declared that he would have enjoyed the day had we been cycling!!
Look Out
July 26th, 2014
The summer holidays are now in full swing. Christine and her Mum took the children to try out the latest summer trail and new wild play area at Mottifsont yesterday. Today, I got to join in the fun as we joined friends at the Look Out Discovery Centre, near Bracknell (familiar to many orienteers as the base for many a Star Posts event). We’ve not been in to the Look Out since it gained the Discovery Centre suffix but were suitably impressed as it packed a lot in to the small space. Indeed, despite having many of the same exhibits as Intech, they seemed to do a much better of providing short explanations suitable for children. The children particularly liked the ‘Build it’ exhibit and spent ages winding tiles up the conveyor and then sending them straight back down the chute! We probably also benefitted from the sunshine keeping the hoards outside. Despite being there for nearly six hours, we didn’t make it further in to the forest than the playground.
Hampton Ridge and Hursley
July 19th, 2014Last night the orienteering club had a BBQ over at Hugh Risebrow’s beautifully situated place on the edge of the Hampton Ridge map. There was a 60 minute score event which had the added complication that the Forestry Commission permit required that we stay on the paths. I managed to visit all the controls in 56 mins but took the FC ruling to apply to all paths on the ground, not necessarily just those on the map! In addition to the BBQ, I also managed a game of croquet.
Today it was the last Summer Series event. As it was on home turf at Hursley, I’d been helping with permissions, map corrections, and the first time planner. It was a damp start to the day as we hung controls and there was a minor panic when I realised I was 5 stakes and a kite short. Thankfully the stakes were liberated from road signs and the start managed without a kite. I did then proceed to hang one of the yellow controls in the wrong place as I wasn’t looking at the map!
By first start everything was in place though and the sun also saw fit to shine. I had a quick run (strictly non-competitive this time) before heading back to pick up the rest of the family. Christine secured her second place in the Summer Series handicap whilst I took the children round the yellow course for their first win of the season. They then enjoyed thrashing the nettles with big sticks with the other youngsters!
Meetup Happy
July 19th, 2014I’ve gone a bit meetup happy in the past two weeks. Last week I headed along to the Pivotal offices in London for the first London Cloud Foundry User Group meetup organised by one-time colleague Duncan Winn. First to speaker was another ex-Hursley employee, Glyn Normington. He gave a fascinating presentation in to the work that he and his colleagues are doing to replace the backend of Cloud Foundry’s Warden container with libcontainer (now split out from Docker). More on this over on Glyn’s blog.
Next up was London based Tammer Saleh, Director of Products at Pivotal Cloud Foundry Services. You can see the recording of this session from the Cloud Foundry Summit where they talk about the different models for stacking server instances. Finally, James Watters (Vice President of Product, Marketing and Ecosystem for Cloud Foundry at Pivotal) talked about the roadmap for Cloud Foundry in 2014 (including what’s out of scope). See James Bayer’s session from the summit for similar information.
The next meetup was my first at Agile South Coast. If nothing else, this gave me an excuse to have a nose at the new(ish) Ordnance Survey offices! I can’t claim to have been welcomed with open arms to the group (no-one even commented on the fact that they hadn’t seen me there before) but that’s fine by me. Most notable to me though was the fact that I was the only one there who wasn’t a scrum master by profession. Have developers lost interest in agile?
As one would expect with this audience, it wasn’t long before the post-it notes were out and we were collaborating on choosing subjects to discuss. My heart sunk when topics such as “should spikes be given points?” were selected but I was glad when the resounding response from the group seemed to be “it doesn’t really matter – whatever works for you”. Oh, and apparently PSM is more through than CSM but the latter gets more CV points! As I’m part way through reading Kanban in Action, the discussion on Scrum vs Agile in a BAU environment was interesting. I may yet make it to another of these meet ups.
The American style pizza and good selection of beer certainly helped make the trip into town worthwhile although I’ll not mistakenly pick up the 7.2% Sierra Nevada Torpedo Extra IPA in future!
Lastly, I returned to Developer South Coast for a session entitled “NoSQL vs SQL… Fight!”. Actually, there wasn’t much of a fight to be had as the speaker (Tony Rogerson) is an SQL Server DBA. He gave a thorough although halting coverage of the theory behind relational and NoSQL databases though which sadly meant he ran out of time before reaching the potentially more interesting topic of NewSQL databases.
Coast Path Finale
June 28th, 2014
Having managed to get a reasonably sized SOC team together for this year’s Dorset Coast Path Relay it was perhaps inevitable that none of the other clubs would! As a consequence, it was decided that we would all join forces for a final record attempt before calling it a day.
SOC was allocated the section from Hardy’s Monument to Osmington. At ~15km I couldn’t really justify dragging 18 people down to Dorset even for a record attempt and we were eventually a (sub-)team of 10. I was off first and had a somewhat flustered start as it was shortly after being told that I had about 20 minutes to wait! I still haven’t completely thrown the cough that’s been plaguing me for the last month and my breathing was somewhat laboured. As I handed over to Andrew Nash it was clear that I wasn’t in any state to run the King of the Coast section later with Tim and Tamsin.
Christine and I were meant to help with a couple of hill sections but we managed to miss both of them. We therefore headed off to Studland for the children to enjoy the beach. Sadly when the incoming runner finally reached the group waiting for the mass run along the beach we were already well over the previous record time. Christine ran with them and then jogged back before we all headed to the pub.
Thankfully, of the promised sunshine and heavy showers, the latter part didn’t show its face until we were driving home. It’s sad to think of this as the last Coast Path Relay – maybe its time will come again…
Back to Hilliers
June 8th, 2014After having let our Hillier Gardens membership lapse for a few months we finally renewed it last weekend. We took a look at this year’s sculpture’s in the garden on a lovely sunny afternoon with an ice cream just to ensure that the children want to come back again soon! We went for the ‘Plus’ membership again which includes the Hants County Council ‘Culture-All’ pass so we can now once again resume our trips out to the various and varied locations it covers. This weekend the orienteering club’s summer series event was at Queen Elizabeth Country Park so free parking there is one we can tick off the list. Having arrived sufficiently late to miss the morning’s downpours, we were treated to yet another lovely sunny afternoon. The children enjoyed their yellow course, the various playgrounds, and yet another ice cream. It must be summer!
Emma @ 7
June 2nd, 2014
Emma’s birthday this year was a drawn out affair. Falling in half-term she had her party the weekend before. This was to have been a trip out to a cinema and restaurant with a few friends but, due to some confusion over cinema schedules (at one point it looked like Godzilla was going to be the only film on!), we actually ended up having those same few friends round to watch a film at our house which proved very easy for us. I donned black tie to serve lunch. Emma chose a selection of films from Google Play/Amazon Instant Video in advance and, after consulting her friends and tossing a coin for the tie-breaker, they ended up with the somewhat surprising choice of Charlotte’s Web, a film released before Emma was even born!
On the day itself, the weather forecast looked particularly poor. As a result, we deferred hunting for Fairy Doors at Furzey Gardens until later in the week and joined the crowds at Winchester Discovery Centre instead. I’m still not sure why Emma enjoys going there so much. The previous week she had declared that science was her favourite subject at school only to spoil things somewhat by adding that she particularly liked the bit where God made the world! Typically, of the presents she received, the small dressable dolls that Granny Sue had picked up in a charity shop appear to be the favourite, outlasting the novelty of the loom bands. She had to wait another week to move in to her main present from us: her own bedroom. In many ways it’s sad that we don’t get to listen to them chatting away to each other after we’ve said good night and, once Emma has a little more furniture, there will be the inevitable tears as they try to divide up the books and soft toys between them, but I think they will both appreciate having a little space that they can call their own.
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