The Thought Process

How different people approach the same problem is an interest of mine. Ever since I first started analysing requirements for computer programs — and then designing, writing, testing and documenting them — the reasons behind the decision-making process of each individual for the design choices and selections they make has been somewhat of a puzzle.

'Back in the day' when I started hacking code — the early 1970s — Computer Programming was still very much 'an Art'. Something little known to the majority of the population, almost the practice of a religion by its acolytes and preachers who deigned to tell the rest of the world how things would be done, rather than expect the congregation to perform the rites themselves. By the late 80s I'd felt things had changed so much that I left the industry for a while and joined the entertainment business — sound engineering, lighting design, tour management — as an escape from the keyboard and a recognition that writing code was a far more wide-spread and, sadly, less artful activity.

Now though I write stuff again, either because it is something I particularly need for my own purposes — and if I see that others might find it useful too I release it as open source software, usually under the GPL — or because the idea of solving that particular problem appeals to me.

Last week one such problem appeared on the horizon. The Tuttle Club — a weekly meeting of 'social media' types which I take part in as often as I can — has had a sign-up facility on a wiki for a long time now, yet it has fallen into dis-use as fewer people mark their intention to attend. In so doing it loses the benefit of the list for others to know who was there when they need a prompt for the name of the person they had an interesting chat with and want to follow-up the discussion that was started at the meeting, so Lloyd, who mostly started the club, commented that some sort of 'bot' was needed where attendees could more easily indicate their intentions and check on who came would be useful.

My own immediate thoughts were that Twitter by itself could provide the required interface and storage capacity; use a hashtag or reply to key into the bot and a simple code would provide the flagging of who was coming and who wasn't. Indeed a few people have created bots using such a technique and they do part of the task.

But I say part of the task because I quickly noted that whilst such a simple service was easy to create it wouldn't actually be of much use. After each event, at some point, you need to 'wipe the slate clean' for that meeting so that people can show they are coming to the next one. In all likelihood that can't be too late otherwise there isn't time to mark the next meeting yet it will also lose the attendance at the previous one — and sod's law says that you will want to check someone's details after it was wiped not before! So I sat down to spec out a 'better' (in my opinion, anyway!) specification of what I'd like to be able to use such a bot for, and first registered a suitable domain name and twitter id for the purpose.

My notes included that the London Tuttle isn't the only one now; it has offspring as near as StationX in Bletchley, and as far away as Los Angeles. It isn't only on a Friday — just recently there was a Wednesday meetup which I attended along with a dozen others not all of whom I know the names or handles of yet would like to — and the need for better publicity for sponsors and to generally 'be more useful' suggested to me that a 'proper' solution would be more useful in the long run, both to organisers and attendees, than the short-period recording otherwise available. So, although being slowed down by the events of 'life' — in my case visiting my mother for the weekend and taking her out — that 'more complete' version is what I have 'specced up' for me to develop and hope to present to the world in the next few days.

Oh, and once I'm happy with it then yes, most of it will surely be open-sourced, as that is what I do.

BarCamp London

I've spent the weekend geeking out at the latest BarCampLondon in the lovely new offices of The Guardian by the canal at Kings Cross. Two days with lots of meeting people, talking about tech, food, politics, and anything else the attendees feel like talking about. I ran a session on Stalking for Beginners which was actually more about choosing and using an online handle. What does it say about you if you always use the same name for all services, indeed should you have your 'business life' easily associated with your 'free-time activities', and how can you stop that happening if at all. Unlike my previous BarCamp I actually went to a session in each timeslot on both days and enjoyed it immensely. If it wasn't for the too much sugar symptoms right now I'd probably be hacking code on some of the many ideas I've been sparked with over the weekend.

Ada Lovelace Day

Some month's ago, Suw (Charman-Anderson) suggested that there should be a celebration today of admirable women in technology, and invited everyone to pledge to write a blog about someone they'd chosen, alongside celebrating the life of the world's first computer programmer Ada Lovelace (1815-1852). Back, in the distant past of 1972, I was a schoolgirl in Hemel Hempstead, one of the over-spill 'new towns' around London built after the war. After I completed my GCE 'O'-levels I had to select the courses I would study during the final two years there in the sixth form. Initially I was only planning on taking two 'A'-levels (that being all which was required to get into university back then!) but in the end a third was added, and then I was told I "had too many free periods". I was given the option of either taking Human Biology 'O'-level, or taking the Computer Programming course. Well … as I'd not taken 'normal' Biology 'O'-level I quickly decided that I'd probably find difficulties in the more 'specialist' course (and, hey, it was something I would, ahem, "discover for myself" before too long!) so the programming course was the one I went for. Now you need to remember how long ago this was. 1972 was still the era of 'Big Iron' — large mainframe computers — and the web was some twenty years in the future. The teacher for this class was a young woman who had only recently joined the teaching profession and her 'qualifications' for teaching the course — the first year it had run at the school — were that she had spent that summer working for British Aerospace on computer programs designing the wings for Concorde! Her class of eager young sixth-formers numbered around 15, and she started out by teaching us BASIC (the acronym stands for Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. Each lesson covered one instruction of the language and each week we students would write out our code on sheets of paper pre-printed with line numbers and boxes; each character of our program being carefully written in the boxes. This was then sent off to Hatfield Polytechnic which owned a PDP-10 made by DEC (Digital Equipment Corp. The college staff would type in our code to produce a punched paper tape, and then process this to produce an output printout. The paper tape and output would then be returned to the school in time for the following week's lesson. After a few weeks of this I found that computer programming was something that 'clicked' with me and I asked the teacher to let me borrow her manuals so that I could go faster — I was finding the 'one instruction per week' rate until that point far too slow. Thankfully, she did, and I raced on. I also got the agreement of the school that I could leave the premises every Friday morning (when everyone else was doing PE) and head into town to the F.E. College as, I had learnt, they had a teletype terminal connected by a phone line to the machine over in Hatfield. Quickly I had moved into the modern world of time-sharing, and later I started using my moped to go to the polytechnic most Saturday mornings to use the terminals just outside the machine room. After another couple of weeks I ended up taking over the class. I'd already been helping my classmates and the teacher realised that she had fallen behind me! A few years ago I met up with an old schoolfriend via Friends Reunited and she recalled the course and how I'd ended up in charge with some fondness (she having since become a teacher herself - of IT!) Subsequently, whilst still at school, I taught myself FORTRAN and then successfully applied to Imperial College to read Computing Science. I've been in the computer industry in some form or another ever since. And all thanks to that young teacher. Sadly, very sadly, I cannot remember her name all these years on. But I still remember the effect she had on me and my classmates in involving us in the very new science — or 'art', is it truly was then — of computer programming. Thank you Teacher, where ever you may be. I couldn't have done it without you.

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One can make good arguments about when to be 'Transitional' and when to be 'Strict' and whilst ever site should be one or t'other which one you should aim for is sometimes like asking to you prefer the American league or the National league^†: they are both great, but slightly different. Anyway, after developing for the last week or so it was time to hit the W3C validators and get the XHTML and CSS which provide this site to validate cleanly. Getting to 'Transitional' didn't take too long, thankfully, even though the usual "you have 400+ errors" is a little startling at first (as per usual they boil down to a couple of dozen simple things that are repeated) and the CSS about another half-hour. Getting to 'Strict' though, well, that was more of a major task, requiring quite a bit of re-writing both in the modules I've written but also in the main sections of the site. Anyway, it is now *perfect*. Well, it meets the standards, anyway. A bit more work to do though, maybe, on some of the ideas I've been working on … ^† Major League Baseball - let's hear it for Redsox nation!

Creeping Elegance?

I recently came across this term in a discussion on facebook and thought it sounded nice. I've always been an iterative sort of person, both in the computer software design field and in 'real life'. Get something simple working, then add and test each feature you are needing from that working base. Some people call that agile but I just call it sensible (hey I started with mainframes so I've seen it all!). Anyway, this " creeping elegance" term sounded fine. Until I read the articles on it. Not only the brief line on Wikipedia but also in other places and even Websters . So maybe what sounded wonderful to me is rather misunderstood by the rest of the world. Time to reclaim the phrase, maybe?