Matthew Lang

Wired answers the question in 8 bit. Funnily enough, the number of possible worlds is similar to the number of planets generated in No Man's Sky which is 18 quintillion.

Learning tends to come from acquiring the knowledge of topics that we're not familiar with. This is why as kids we all went to school. At a young age we have limited knowledge of how to read, write and count. Through years of education and study we eventually acquire enough knowledge to allow us to learn and understand each of these topics. We can specialise in this new found knowledge by going to college or university or moving into the workplace and getting a job.

What about what we already know?

There I was this morning setting up a new database for an application I've been working on for a client when I noticed that the application's scripts to setup the database wouldn't run due to a dependency on data in the database that was always assumed to be there. Simply put, I couldn't create the database from these scripts.

So my knowledge of the application has changed and I have learned something new. What I have learned isn't a new topic, just a tiny part of a topic I already know. My experience with the database scripts has taught me that basing the build process of the database on data that is already assumed to be there is wrong.

While we tend to seek out to learn from new topics, we forget that we can also learn from experiences. At time we might think that the knowledge we have is correct, but it's only through experiences that we find out whether it is correct or not. In this case I have raised my concerns with the client about the build scripts for the database and proposed a solution to correct it in the future.

Always be learning. Whether it's from new topics we know nothing of or by fine tuning the knowledge we have through experiences.

I've worked in a couple of open-office layouts but nothing near having to share the same table with other colleagues.

Our new, modern Tribeca office was beautifully airy, and yet remarkably oppressive. Nothing was private. On the first day, I took my seat at the table assigned to our creative department, next to a nice woman who I suspect was an air horn in a former life. All day, there was constant shuffling, yelling, and laughing, along with loud music piped through a PA system. As an excessive water drinker, I feared my co-workers were tallying my frequent bathroom trips. At day’s end, I bid adieu to the 12 pairs of eyes I felt judging my 5:04 p.m. departure time. I beelined to the Beats store to purchase their best noise-cancelling headphones in an unmistakably visible neon blue.

Workers need privacy just as much as they need to open spaces.

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.