JFDI

In the last few years I’ve been more involved in recruitment and seeing a lot of CVs for developer roles has given me some thoughts on what makes a good technical CV.

On our team we always commit code using pull requests, for review by someone who hasn’t worked on that code.

A few weeks ago I wrote a post about being a technical architect, and one of my main conclusions was that you need to stay technical.

I have wanted to be a technical architect since I started out in IT, and last September I was delighted to achieve this long-held goal.

At GDS, most of our code is publicly available in our alphagov organisation on GitHub.

Last year I wrote about how anonymous submissions affected gender balance at SPA conference.

I am a published author!

I did my first Ignite talk in November last year, based on roof bug-fixing, and these are some of the things I found useful while preparing.

I refer back to this useful email from Mike Pountney pretty frequently, even though it’s easy enough to look up, so thought I’d save it here. git checkout master && git pull && git fetch upstream && git merge upstream/master && git push

When I started working on vCloud Tools, we had most of our functionality in one repository.

At Scottish Ruby Conference earlier this week, among the many great talks I attended was Jess Eldredge’s excellent introduction to sketchnoting.

Over the last few months, I’ve been leading a small team building tools to automate creation and configuration of our servers.

At ScaleSummit last week, I proposed a session on running Open Source projects.

As co-Programme Chair for SPA conference I often find myself trying to persuade inexperienced or completely new speakers that it is worth doing and that they have something great to say.

Over the next few months we will be recruiting for a number of roles, including developers and web operations engineers.

Mainly inspired by this article, I proposed that we make submissions anonymous for SPA2013.

I learnt three very interesting things recently, courtesy of the brilliant Dan Carley. git filter-branch how to create a puppet module using our puppet module skeleton shopt -s dotglob While creating the Puppet manifests for the GOV.UK mirror, we realised…

The first day at a new job is always a bit nerve-wracking.

I often find myself viewing life through the lens of software development, a bit like when you play too much Tetris and all your friends turn into shapes.

I needed to write some code.

Today I learned from the awesome bob how to add storage to a box, including partitioning, mounting, and other things I'd heard of but had never done myself.

Two weeks ago I was at the excellent /dev/fort.

I want to share this great idea about estimating that came from the excellent Mazz Mosley.

Now that GOV.UK has replaced Directgov and BusinessLink, and departments are moving to Inside Government, we want to make sure that people visiting links to the old sites get where they need to be.

After some time muddling through with Perl, I have accepted the inevitable – it's time to actually knuckle down and learn it properly.

I had a really inspiring chat with Matt Biddulph about D3 this week.

The last thing I wrote about was the CAP Theorem.

This week I learned some things about MongoDB.

We've got some great data for the SPA2012 workshop on JavaScript visualisations.

My goal is to be a better developer.

I had no idea what to expect at my first game jam, and I was nervous about whether I'd be able to participate.

Just over a week to go until the final deadline for the SPA submissions, and the JavaScript visualisations talk is shaping up.

As part of preparing the proposal for the JavaScript visualisations talk, I had a coffee with Ian Alderson.

I have proposed a talk for SPA2012 on JavaScript visualisations.

Summarised excellently by this cartoon.

Well, the lack of sorl-thumbnail came back to bite me when I got the latest version of the Django project I've been working on.

I recently did a knowledge share at work on how to write efficient CSS, and one of my colleagues – a senior developer with a lot of experience – said "I felt the penny drop".

I recently did a knowledge share at work on how to write efficient CSS, and one of my colleagues – a senior developer with a lot of experience – said "I felt the penny drop".

Right, it turned out my next step was not a chat with Joe Halliwell but instead with my good friend and mentor, Dolan O'Toole, and what I thought might be a voyage of discovery into how to make my installation of firefox run like a normal program turned o…

So.

Easy_install (as it comes) doesn't work for Debian-based systems.