Older blog entries for nbm (starting at number 96)

GeekDinner: Garrulous Grape reportback

Another successful Cape Town Geekdinner, Garrulous Grape, has come and gone, marking the start of our second year.  Not much to say beyond great people, great vibe, and, at times, great entertainment (Brad Whittington doing Tania's Slideshow Karaoke was hilarious).

Others have more to say, though:

Special thanks to Perdeberg for the wine - I'm sure there'll be a bunch of new entries into their clink-to-win competition.

Plans for May Cape Town GeekDinner are already underway, and I might organise a GeekBrunch some Sunday or GeekPoker some weeknight in April for those who need an intermediate fix.

Syndicated 2008-04-03 20:35:40 from Cosmic Seriosity Balance

GeekDinner: Garrulous Grape and CTPUG 9

The GeekDinner Cape Town first birthday dinner is upon us - Garrulous Grape is our seventh GeekDinner (one year and three days after the first one), happening on Monday, 31st March from 7pm at Greens in Plattekloof.  Yes, we've finally headed north!

Before that, the Cape Town Python User Group meeting (aka CTPUG 9) at the Bandwidth Barn on Saturday, 29th March, from 2pm.

Syndicated 2008-03-27 13:44:34 from Cosmic Seriosity Balance

PyCon 2008 blog coverage outstanding

Despite my best plans, PyCon 2008 in Chicago was not my first PyCon.  I've been following PyCon blog coverage over the years, and this year's is many times better than before.  And it's not a sudden increase in the number of blogs or new people - it's also that the same people are writing a lot more.

So, thanks to everyone who wrote about PyCon 2008, and hopefully I'll see you next year in Chicago.

Just randomly from the pages open from my aggregator, here are some posts:

Syndicated 2008-03-18 23:25:45 from Cosmic Seriosity Balance

translate.org.za makes Google Summer of Code, is hiring

One of my favourite South African open source enterprises is translate.org.za - which, amongst other great things, is behind two good pieces of (Python) software - Translate Toolkit (a library of converters between different translation formats) and Pootle (a web app for people to do translations through).

Those two pieces of software are potential targets for those entering Google Summer of Code 2008 - they're one of 175 organisations/projects chosen out of 500 applications.  And looking at the high-quality project ideas page they put together, you can see why their application was successful.

The translate.org.za people are also looking to hire a Python developer in Pretoria - I doubt there are all that many opportunities to work full-time on an open source project in South Africa (let alone in Python), so hopefully they'll find a good match.

This makes South Africa being represented as both student and mentoring organisation in Google Summer of Code (and, I'm guessing, there'll be a mentor from translate.org.za this year too), as well as a finalist in the Google Highly Open Participation Contest all in the past year and a bit...

Syndicated 2008-03-18 20:51:15 from Cosmic Seriosity Balance

The Struggles of New Graduates, big brothers, "onboarding"

Greg Wilson has been posting interesting things about SIGCSE'08, the conference of the Computer Science Education special interest group of the ACM.

The most interesting of the many many posts is one on the struggles of new graduates, relating a presentation given by Andrew Begel who researched what new graduates got up to when they start their jobs as software developers.

I haven't had especiallymuch experience in terms of identifying and working with new graduates - generally the people I've worked well with and hired already had quite a bit of experience before we met.  But I love the idea of helping someone navigate that early part of their career.

There are two classes of mistakes that happen. 

  • The first is that the new graduates need to identify those people that they can confidently interact with and learn the unwritten rules of the environment from, as well as bounce their own ideas off of to get feedback. 
  • The second is where the  environment puts new graduates into situations where they can't rely on their existing skills.

As noted, new grads generally get put onto existing projects which have their own politics and problems - usually that the project is late, is over budget, has been poorly managed, has been poorly documented, and, often, has been poorly developed by people that no longer are on the project (and, often, no longer at the company).  Not exactly the smooth introduction to the rewarding career as a software developer...

While they may know the basics of version control, issue management, and so forth, they often have to blindly fight through many unwritten rules that apply to this company and this project.  Each person they interact with is going to require different things from them and also hold information that they might require - they're unlikely to have been taught the soft skills necessary to firstly determine clearly what everyone wants from them, and to communicate what they will do and what they need from others.

I'm tending towards thinking that new grads and those new to the sort of environment you're in (say, worked in industry but not academia, or worked in small company in-house development but not large-scale financial services bespoke work) need a "big brother" assigned to them formally to teach them the ropes and through which any feedback on their performance is handled.

This way the new grad has a single person telling them the good and the bad, in a constructive and trusted manner.  The new grad knows who to ask for help when they need it - whether it's where something lives or how best to interact with the various personalities in the team.

This still leaves the problem of how to identify and train this "big brother" - but that's a problem to be pondered another time.

Syndicated 2008-03-18 17:23:01 from Cosmic Seriosity Balance

History of File Systems (abridged)

If you didn't live through Operating Systems of the 70s, 80s, and 90s (or caught the lecture at university), then you might want to read this ArsTechnica article on the history of the more mainstream filesystems so you can fake your way authoritatively when the topic comes up.

(It doesn't cover less mainstream or specific-purpose filesystems or cover more interesting work done on some of the filesystems it does mention - particularly on the BSD side of things.  You'll have to do your own research on those.  Try FreeBSD 7.0, maybe?)

Syndicated 2008-03-18 14:28:43 from Cosmic Seriosity Balance

Firefox 3.0b4 and multiple Firefox versions on OS X

Firefox is a pig.  Well, it was a pig, and now, as of Firefox 3.0b4, it's a piglet.

Since November, I've been using Safari as my main browser, and hauling out Firefox for particular sites that don't work in Safari or for when I needed Firebug.  As of last week, I've changed back to Firefox.

I wouldn't say Firefox necessarily uses less memory than Safari now, but it stopped being worth having both of them open.  Firefox 3.0b4 not only uses much less memory than before, but it reclaims memory better.  I've had about three crashes, but none in the past few days.

Before I realised that you could just use the Firebug 1.1 beta, I thought I wanted to run both Firefox 2 and Firefox 3.0b4.  It turns out to be fairly easy.  Rename the Firefox 2 application to something imaginative like Firefox2.  Create a simple shell script named firefox.sh (or whatever you want):

#!/bin/sh

MYDIR=`dirname "$0"`
cd "${MYDIR}"
./firefox-bin -P firefox2 "$@"

Copy that shell script into Firefox2.app/Contents/MacOS on the command line, or right-click on Firefox2 in Finder, select "Show Package Contents", and paste it into the Contents/MacOS directory.

From the command line, run "open Info.plist" in the Contents directory, or simply double-click it in Finder.  Change the Root/CFBundleExecutable to firefox.sh (or whatever you called it).

You can now run the Firefox2.app application and use "Keep in Dock" on it.  The first time you run it, it will show the profile manager.  Create a profile named "firefox2".  You can install Firefox 2 add-ons and so forth without interfering with your Firefox 3.0b4 install.  Or so it seems so far, at least.

Syndicated 2008-03-17 21:10:27 from Cosmic Seriosity Balance

New opportunities available at SynthaSite

That I'm having more fun working recently than I can recall having before hasn't changed, and part of that is working with some of the best people in the country (and occasionally in the industry as a whole) here at SynthaSite.  And now we're hiring (in both San Francisco and Cape Town, but I'm talking about the team here in Cape Town).  If that interests you and you think you're pretty hot (even if you might need some experience to fully shine), I don't think you can find a better place to work in Cape Town.

There are four positions open in Cape Town - two technology and two admin/support positions.  (And we're always open to getting to know people who are as passionate about making a great product as we are.)

The sysadmin position will join Lisa and I in the "systems" team mostly on the infrastructure side.  I've been doing most of the system administration in the company since I got there, automating as I go, but it's not something I can do as well as I'd like and still work on the things I most want to work on.

This job is probably fairly flexible.  You might be starting out, in which case we'll help you grow into the position.  You might be hard-core, in which case we'll generally keep out of your way.  Or you might want to do a bit of sysadmin and a bit of platform or product development.

We also need someone to spend most of their time researching and building platform prototypes and then production systems as we move through iterative and large-scale improvements to our platform.  This is the "platform engineer".

The other two positions are for a copywriter and a support person - although, there's always scope to get involved in any number of other activities - QA, research, user testing, and so forth.

Syndicated 2008-03-13 19:30:07 from Cosmic Seriosity Balance

FreeBSD 7.0

I'm a bit behind the times on this one (Tectonic had a story immediately), but FreeBSD 7.0 was announced two weeks back.  For more information, check out this interview with a few FreeBSD developers about FreeBSD 7.0 as well as this FreeBSD 7.0 preview presentation that contains quite a bit on performance improvements.

Syndicated 2008-03-13 16:09:31 from Cosmic Seriosity Balance

Project Automation at Cape Town SPIN next week

The Cape Town SPIN (who don't believe in permalinks for meeting information, so you can only ever get information on the next Cape Town SPIN meeting) is meeting on Wednesday, March 19, to discuss Project Automation and Software Configuration Management.

 

Software Configuration Management

Software configuration management, and its central theme of version control, is and old topic, and yet many people ship software products without really getting all the potential benefits. In this talk I'll survey the current state of the art in tools and thinking. A few recommendations will be made, especially for small teams who are not too keen on heavy-weight process.

Project Automation

Performing repetitive tasks is tedious, error prone and never fun. Software projects is full of potentially boring but important task, such as building, testing and deployment.

Automating such tasks does not only relieve pain but also provide the development team with a useful early warning system. However, one needs to be pragmatic about the time spent creating and maintaining automated tasks.

These are topics close to my heart (and memory, since this is what I've spent a large chunk of my time focusing on the last few months), so I'll probably be at the Bandwidth Barn from 18:15 next Wednesday to hear what the speakers have to say.

 

Syndicated 2008-03-13 14:24:41 from Cosmic Seriosity Balance

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