In mid-October I'll be speaking at Strange Loop in St. Louis about Google's exciting new systems language Go and my open-source GoLightly project.

GoLightly's a library for implementing virtual machines that exploit the intinsically concurrent design Google (or more to the point Rob Pike and playmates) have adopted in Go. Having CSP-style ( Read more... )

Dear Andrew Love ( Read more... )

My RubyConf 2009 proposal which alas didn't make the cut.

Summary
Ruby is a beautiful language, and because of that beauty we tend to ignore the fact that it's also highly disruptive. In recent years it's revolutionised the world of web development and changed the direction of the Java Virtual Machine, but we've only scratched the surface of what's ( Read more... )

I get an interesting collection of daily political news snippets in my email thanks to the lovely folks at ConservativeHome and when I'm in the mood for procrastination (like I am this afternoon, stealing ten minutes on the computer whilst Tom takes a nap) much fun is had following them up ( Read more... )

This government has a track record of trying to gag Parliament in one way or another, the most infamous example being their attempt to force the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill through a few years back. This week's Parliamentary Standards Bill is a similarly undesirable piece of legislation, even in the largely emasculated form in which it's ( Read more... )

Thursday was an unusually busy day for me.

( UK Enum Consortium AGM )

The exit polls from GoRuCo are in, and I placed last with an averaged rating of 2.66 out of 5. Bah! Even Gordon Brown can do better than that.

To be honest I'm not surprised, so those of you who feel you have to say positive things about the video are now officially excused ;p It was the first outing of what is actually a very difficult topic to ( Read more... )

The nice folks at Lone Star Ruby Conference accepted my proposal for a tutorial on Ruby and Unix called Things You Really Shouldn't Do With Ruby But Can. I get three hours on a Thursday afternoon to teach all kinds of weird tricks that probably aren't safe to a random assortment of Ruby lovers. The upside of that is that it follows Rich Kilmer's ( Read more... )

Wednesday night I joined a friendly gather of dynamic language fans for an evening of lightning talks at BCS HQ in Central London. It's easy when you're part of a specific language community to lose track of the broader divisions in programming so it was interesting seeing the perspective of Perl, SmallTalk and JavaScript users on many of the ( Read more... )

Me in full-flow at GoRuCo. It probably would have been worse if I hadn't had the hangover, all things considered.