This is post tries to explain some of what I was talking about in my talk at weactuallybuildstuff.com, it’s series of two posts, I’ve tried write it as one post but it got too long and icky, so I’ve split it into two. I believe at the heart of Software Development culture there is an identity crisis. I say this because I believe software development to be an engineering discipline, based on science, but many of fellow developers do not believe this. They say it is an art form or a craft. To support my ar[...]

As part of the app I developed for AngelHack I wanted to display some data in a classic grid style. Android offers a GridView as part of the basic SDK, however if you look at all the samples they only show how to use it as a grid of images, essentially they only demonstrate usages where all columns show the same thing, usually columns of photographs. It’s not too tricky to use the GridView as classic “data grid” but it did require a wee bit of thinking, so I thought I put together a quick example to show h[...]

As I’ve already mentioned last weekend I took part in AngelHack and took the opportunity to learn how to develop for an Android device (in this case a Kindle Fire) using C# and Xamarin Studio. The experience was a bit mixed, overall I think the folks at Xamarin have done a good job in smoothing the experience when targeting mobile devices, but there’s still a few rough edges. Here’s a run though of what I thought: The installer for Xamarin Studio works well and does a good job of downloading and installin[...]

AngelHack Paris is the first “hack day” I have every attended, so I didn’t really know what to except. Early on Saturday morning I found myself in a slightly run down area just outside the “peripherique” road that marks the boundary of Pairs. The event was hosted at “cifacom” a colleague for digital design and art, I was quite sure what to make to their campus, about half seemed to swish lectures theaters and the rest seemed to have been basically left as the old warehouse that it was before it is was conv[...]

Last Wednesday I got the chance to attend a “Coding Breakfast” hosted by Damien Thouvenin of CLT Services. The concept is simple, turn up a little before 8:30, enjoy some coffee and croissant, then we attempt a Coding Kata for about an hour and finally we get together to review the results. I was pleased to see the great and the good of the Paris coding scene there, in the form of Yann Schwartz and Jérémie Chassaing. The chosen Kata was the “Parking Meter” problem. Create a function to calculate how much [...]