On day 1 of the Progressive F# Tutorials in NYC on the beginner’s track we started with the F# Koans to introduce F#’s syntax and language features, and then finished up with F# Katas to put some of that learning into practice. On day 2 the idea was to look at how to structure F# programs through a tutorial on Domain-specific languages (DSLs) in F#, and finish up the day with a fun programming contest. DSLs Here are the slides, they’re a little sparse as most of the session was a hands-on tutorial wit[...]

Last week I flew out to New York for the Progressive F# Tutorials NYC hosted by Skills Matter and organised by Richard Minerich. The event was held in the atmospheric Liberty Hall event space at the Ace hotel in mid-town Manhattan, and not far from the Empire State Building. Keynote Don Syme kicked off proceedings with a keynote on Being Successful with Functional-first techniques in Finance (you can check out the video of a broadly similar talk at the Progressive .Net Tutorials in London). In the talk[...]

Definition of iconoclast from Wikipedia: An iconoclast is someone who engages in iconoclasm—destruction of religious symbols or, by extension, established dogma or conventions. Recently the GOTO Copenhagen conference had a track dedicated to Iconoclasts. Here’s my short list of Iconoclasts primarily on OOP & TDD with examples: Paul Graham: Revenge of the Nerds essay discussing the “industry best practice” misnomer Rich Hickey: Simple Made Easy talk at Strangeloop questioning TDD & Agile [...]

This week I had the please of attending GOTO Copenhagen - a 3 day developer conference covering a diverse range of topics. Day 1 I started the day on the excellent Beyond the Microsoft Echo Chamber track taking in: Mark Seeman on Bending AutoFixture to your will Tobias Gedell on Eden: An F#/WPF framework for building GUI tools Glenn Block on Breaking the Barrier with Node.js on Windows and Azure Mark demonstrated his open source project AutoFixture aimed at writing maintainable unit tester[...]

The growth of Agile and associated techniques like TDD and BDD has put a significant focus on delivering functional requirements via stories and automated tests. This is in part a side effect of the productivity of teams often being measured in terms of story points, bug counts and test coverage. Unfortunately this can leave non-functional requirements like performance as secondary concerns. Clearly premature optimization is the root of all evil (actually I find micro-optimization a better euphemism); th[...]