Developer conferences are a great way to learn about new and existing technologies. Almost as important are the conversations in the corridors between talks and bars after to find out what your peers from other companies are up to. Without them your company may run the risk of becoming like a small island cut off from the mainland, perpetuating a monoculture. But there are a bewildering array of conferences to choose from, and for most of us only a limited time and budget to work with. Here’s a few ti[...]

Skills Matter are excited to host the first ever New York GameCraft event on Friday 20th September at the DUMBO Loft! Following the phenomenal success and excitement around Dublin GameCraft, the event is now going global with a event also planned in London! GameCraft is a games jam event designed around building the gaming community. We aim to create events which allow game-makers to meet, share ideas, have fun, compete for prizes and most importantly make games. The events will be facilitated by Games exp[...]

Last weekend I set about mining all the links from Alvin Ashcraft's Morning Dew excellent link blog site which has been documenting .Net goings on since 2007. In the back of my mind was the idea of applying some machine learning techniques to automatically generate blog article recommendations using the labelled links as training data. Each link in Alvin's site has a date, category, title and author. I took 2 passes: programmatically find all the post urls parse the HTML posts using the HTML Agility [...]

A little while back I stumbled upon a fun generative art project by Maxime Chevalier called Turing drawings that produces 2D procedural art based on randomly generated Turing machines. The project’s code is in JavaScript using a HTML canvas which you can try online, just hit the random button to generate all sorts of weird and wonderful pieces. The project has inspired amongst other things a port to asm.js and a version with genetic recombination of URLs. For fun I’ve created an F# script that generates T[...]

Last night I popped down to Southampton to talk about F# in the Enterprise at the Developer South Coast meetup started by John McLoughlin. The group has grown quite a bit since last time I was down in 2010, and the hall was packed with about 50 members. It’s a really friendly group with a lot of interesting activities going on including hack weekends covering everything from electronics all the way through to games programming. FSharp in the enterprise from ptrelford John contacted me after interest[...]