Monthly Archives: August 2011

Reflections on improving my programming skills

I’ve been thinking about programming this week. Perhaps this comes from the new started in our team this week and the energy  boost that we’ve had from that. Might also come from the fact that I’m off to Drupalcon tomorrow morning. Either way… I caught a post on Hacker News about becoming a better programmer […]

The overrated ‘death’ of middleware

I like the High Scalability blog but a recent post on the death of middleware did leave me shaking my head. Although discussing the idea of Platform as a Service, the article argument argued that the traditional middleware layer is dead, replaced by items such as RabbitMQ or ActiveMQ. I can see the argument if […]

Thinking about texts and communities at Textcamp

Having gone to Textcamp yesterday, I started playing with Wordle and IBM’s Many Eyes at the suggestion of Dave Flanders of the JISC. As James Harriman-Smith, the organiser and Open Literature co-ordinator for the Open Knowledge Foundation, had suggested that this year is the anniversary of the manuscript of Alexander Pope‘s An Essay in Criticism, […]

Thoughts on DevOps

I’ve been reading a little about DevOps. I’ve come across it before but never really tried to explore it in detail. Until now. Why? Well it is increasingly clear that it will be helpful to our team and in part is something that I’ve moved towards in my last couple of jobs. At the previous […]