Matthew Lang

As I move towards building up my GitHub profile with examples of work, I realised something about my side projects. They provided the perfect place to try new things and familiarise myself with new programming languages and frameworks.

Most web developers have probably at one time or another had a side project running alongside their day job. It could be an open source web application, a framework, a library or even a product or service that provides an extra bit of income. Regardless of what it is, having a side project is one of those things that web developers usually end up doing. It's almost like a rite of passage.

Most developers are working on large applications in their day jobs. Some are more fortunate than others on the choice of technology they're working with, but there will always be developers that are not using emerging technologies or languages at their day job. It just isn't always feasible to do.

So what's a developer to do?

Well, like most developers I usually turn to a book to pick up something new. I might read five or six development books in a year. Most of the time I won't go beyond reading the book to exercise the knowledge that I've picked up. When I do though, I usually put together little scripts or programs to get familiar with the language that I've just read about. Beyond that I rarely do anything else.

The best place to exercise your new found knowledge thought is on a side project. When I hit on an idea for a side project, I'll write a little spike for idea in Sinatra or Rails and see if it's worth having around. If it is, I'll keep it and use it for my own purposes. Rarely has anything made it past this point though.

With what I have been using on a daily basis though, I'm starting to tidy these bits of code up and put them on GitHub profile. I have one little side project called ClipPress that I run on a free Heroku instance. It's just a single form that I can fill in a few details and it will create a post in my Jekyll blog on Dropbox. It then syncs back down to my MacBook where I can fix up the post and publish it.

A number of Javascript libraries like Ember, React and Backbone have recently caught my eye. In the past I haven't gone beyond the basic demos with these, but having a side project like ClipPress means that I have a working environment to try out new things. I can plug in different JavaScript frameworks to see how they work. I can write the ClipPress application in a different language or framework just to see how they compare.

The benefit of a side project is that you have a working base to build upon. Building applications from scratch can be tedious work, and making something new for the sake of learning something else means that we might not see the end result in action. With a side project though you can build on the code base you have to see the results in a working environment.

Side projects are often cited as a way of generating extra revenue and they can be that if someone is willing to pay for it, but for most of us we just want to hack something together that removes a manual step we've had to do in the past. These side projects are a great place to try something new and learn from it.

... to SwissMiss. 10 years and still going strong!

FIFA officials are now facing corruption charges for bribery that occurred in the US and was paid through US bank accounts.

As leaders of FIFA, soccer’s global governing body, gathered for their annual meeting, more than a dozen plain-clothed Swiss law enforcement officials arrived unannounced at the Baur au Lac hotel, an elegant five-star property with views of the Alps and Lake Zurich. They went to the front desk to get keys and proceeded upstairs to the rooms.

— FIFA Officials Arrested on Corruption Charges; Blatter Isn’t Among Them by The New York Times

I'm not a big football fan, but it's not good to see one of the worlds biggest sports tainted in the last few years by allegations of corruption.

I wonder if Sepp will get through this scandal unscathed?

I hope not.

Technically, it’s simple. The web cannot emulate native perfectly, and it never will. Native apps talk directly to the operating system, while web apps talk to the browser, which talks to the OS. Thus there’s an extra layer web apps have to pass, and that makes them slightly slower and coarser than native apps. This problem is unsolvable.

— Web vs Native: Let's Concede Defeat by Peter-Paul Koch

It's not all bad though. Peter-Paul does go on to say how web apps can still compete against native apps.

No Man's Sky has high expectations. With a game universe composing of billions of planets, it is set to change the world of gaming. I for one can't wait for its release.

The universe is being built in an old two-story building, in the town of Guildford, half an hour by train from London. About a dozen people are working on it. They sit at computer terminals in three rows on the building’s first floor and, primarily by manipulating lines of code, they make mathematical rules that will determine the age and arrangement of virtual stars, the clustering of asteroid belts and moons and planets, the physics of gravity, the arc of orbits, the density and composition of atmospheres—rain, clear skies, overcast. Planets in the universe will be the size of real planets, and they will be separated from one another by light-years of digital space. A small fraction of them will support complex life.

— World Without End
by The New Yorker

The BBC earth mini-site aims to explain what happens when you fall into a black hole.

After all, the event horizon is not like a brick wall floating in space. It's an artefact of perspective. An observer who remains outside the black hole can't see through it, but that's not your problem. As far as you're concerned there is no horizon.

Sure, if the black hole were smaller you'd have a problem. The force of gravity would be much stronger at your feet than at your head, stretching you out like a piece of spaghetti. But lucky for you this is a big one, millions of times more massive than our Sun, so the forces that might spaghettify you are feeble enough to be ignored.

— The Strange Fate of a Person Falling Into a Black Hole by BBC Earth

I had to read this a couple of times to get it. Well worth the time to read though!

I'm on the fence about whether switching off CCTV cameras to save money is a good or a bad thing for the public. What sent alarm bells off for me though is the mention of CCTV camera being classed a counter-terrorism tool.

Last night the Police Federation said the deactivation of CCTV cameras would introduce “vulnerabilities” to counter-terrorism operations and “deny justice” to the victims of sexual offences and street violence. But civil liberties groups said there was little evidence of the cameras’ effectiveness and that councils were right to keep them under constant review.

— CCTV cameras secretly being switched off by cash-strapped councils by The Independent

The use of 'terrorism' as a reason for keeping CCTV cameras switched on was a step too far though.

I've been searching through various contract opportunities over the last few weeks. Client work is slowing down and I have some availability over the next few months. Might be a good idea to look around then! One common feature of each ad is that most of them have included is this:

Include a link to your GitHub profile.

For the non-developers amongst you, GitHub is a web based source code repository service where developers and organisations can keep copies of the code they are working on and have worked on. To this end, it's often referred to as a resume for developers. Not every developer has a GitHub account though (there are alternatives like BitBucket) and certainly not every developer has an active GitHub account.

Are recruiters (both agencies and companies) basing their candidate search on developers who have active GitHub accounts?

Does my GitHub account reflect the capabilities of myself as a developer?

I certainly hope not.

In the past I moved my repositories over to BitBucket to give it a try. I left my GitHub account open but there was little on it. Now, I'm back to using GitHub and I make use of it by keeping some projects I'm working on there. Most of them are private. They're ideas that I would rather keep to myself. For little projects and other stuff, I throw them up on my GitHub account as public. Not as bragging rights to my capabilities as a developer but to share my code with other developers.

If most agencies were to look at my GitHub profile at the moment and make a decision based on that alone, they would skip right over my application. The problem is though that my GitHub profile is one facet of my career as a developer. I have a good history as a developer and a variety of experience. I have a couple of recommendations on LinkedIn and an up to date CV there. I'm running my second attempt at a product with DailyMuse after I killed the failed Journalong product.

I'm certainly not a developer that lives and breathes code. Once the work day is over, I might hit the trails on the mountain bike, take my son to the golf so he can practice, or just go for a walk with the family. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. There's so many other things I do outside of work that doesn't involve writing code. Yes, I have a number of little side projects on the go. Most developers do, but they're low on my priority list.

While my career is important, it's also important to get the balance right between what you do for your career and what you do elsewhere. I do write code outside of work, but most of the time I'm doing other things like spending time with my family, riding one of my bikes or something else that isn't writing code.

GitHub isn't my resume though. It's one aspect of my resume. It's something to consider yes, but the real value in a software developer isn't the amount of code they write. It's in the way they approach problems, present solutions and communicate with others. And I think I do that rather well.

I'm generally not, but that's okay.

If we didn’t have any early adopters ironing out the kinks, there’d never be a now-safe choice for the late majority. And if everyone always jumped on the latest thing on day one, society would waste needless cycles churning through the broken glass of beta software.

— The Stories We Tell Ourselves by Signal vs Noise

I now know that I bring scale to the products that I wait for.

I can't say if this trend is happening in the UK, but in the Lang house we've almost completely eliminated processed foods in favour of fresh home made meals. The simple pleasure of cooking with fresh ingredients is hard to give up when you've mastered a few basic dishes.