November 16, 2009 @ 15:53
It’s been a busy few months!
Outside of work my fiancee and I have been planning our wedding and bought a house for us to live in when we get married. It was worryingly easy to do the whole thing, it required minimal paperwork. It’s in Broughty Ferry (on the outskirts of Dundee) and the sea is 100m away and visible from my new study. It’s all very exciting and I’m counting down the days until we get married and I move in.
At work, I’ve been involved in some more fun Qt consultancy stuff. It’s all been enjoyable and varied, something that really suits my childlike attention-span. I work from home for KDAB so they’ve had me flying to various places (Germany, Sweden, Denmark so far and Iceland next week) in the course of my duties. I like seeing new places but am a rubbish tourist so it’s been nice to be able to expand my horizons without much personal effort.
One of the nice things about working with Qt and other open-source projects is that I can get to contribute to them at work when a customer needs a feature/bugfix. One of my projects has involved a lot of QtScript and I used QtScriptGenerator for the bindings (wanted to try SMOKE but I couldn’t find enough of a solid internet presence to trust it fully yet). I’ve made a few fixes to support code written in C++ rather than Qt (handle exceptions better, do some automatic C++ standard library type conversion, support C-style single “void” parameter and bugfixing). This stuff is all available from the KDAB QtScriptGenerator clone on Gitorious and should all make it upstream eventually, I’ve made the necessary merge requests and a few of them have already been accepted all merged upstream and part of QtScriptGenerator.
I can’t wait till KDE and more open-source projects move to Git (and Gitorious/GitHub). It’s so amazingly simple to get patches merged and retain your attribution and handle local work branches while tracking upstream, with merging normally being handled near-automagically. This requires so much time to do in Subversion that it really pains me to have to use it now.
Another interesting project I’ve been working on recently is Homebrew, a package manager for OSX that seeks to use system libraries, be fast and make contribution incredibly easy (things that MacPorts and Fink seem to fail at). It uses Git as the repository backing store so you just fork from mxcl’s repository, use “brew create $URL” to create a template package from the URL and archive name, modify it until it works and make a pull request on GitHub. mxcl then looks over your contribution and merges it if it looks good. So far I’ve tweaked Qt and started adding the necessary dependencies to get KDE in there too.
I really like this model. I trust mxcl as a benign dictator, he is a good guy and makes sensible decisions (such as buying me beer), and I feel this method of contribution really opens the project up to many more people than it would otherwise. It also has the Steve Jobs/Linus Torvalds-type figure that I think is essential for any piece of software to have a clear set of goals and maintain a certain quality level.
It’s been nice for me working mostly on my Macbook now. Everything just works that I need to and I can still run pretty much every open-source application I used on Linux. It’s nice to see the vibrant OSS ecosystem on OSX and the attention to detail in applications such as Adium, particularly in having an attractive and easily usable interface. Hopefully I’ll be able to apply this level of polish to some of the KDEPIM apps in the next while too, currently they work great but look a bit nasty on OSX.
Too much writing, back to the code!
Posted in My Life, Software Development
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July 24, 2009 @ 09:52
Seeing all the other postsrecently about people working at KDAB I thought I’d announce that my “secret dream employer” I previously mentioned I was freelancing for was, in fact, KDAB (the Qt consultants) and they decided to take me on as a permanent employee.
It’s an awesome place to work as I get to work from home which means playing my current favourite pretentious but awesome progressive rock nice and loud while I work without having to worry about irritating anyone else. It’s been awesome hanging out with the guys at GCDS and on my various expeditions (in their head office in Sweden at the moment). They are all really cool people who can have a decent laugh while getting lots of cool work done. It’s also been great for me to now have a job with so many amazing software engineers who I can learn from.
My only problem is that they seem like they are hiring everyone now. I thought I was special? Now I just feel like just another notch on the bedpost organisational chart! For each awesome person who gets hired I feel like I deserve to be here even less!
It’s also nice because it’s got me doing way more KDE stuff that I was previously. I’ve been actually getting involved in the KDE Mac project now and hopefully will get to push KDE forward through some (unannounced) work stuff too.
In short, KDAB rocks!
Posted in My Life, Software Development
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June 9, 2009 @ 22:17
It’s been a big few months, hence the lack of blogging!
In the this time I have:
- Left my job at Mendeley working on a cool piece of research software. It was time to move on to other things and there are no hard feelings on either side, hopefully my work on there will continue to be well received and more Linux people (although Windows/Mac are also supported) will check out the cool Qt/C++ reference manager.
- Moved back from London to Edinburgh. I’d been away in Ipswich and London since leaving university and the call of Caledonia became too strong to resist!
- I proposed on the top of Cairngorm to my beautiful best friend and girlfriend. It was here that we’d had our first long chat while walking down seven years ago this summer. She said yes so we’re now planning the wedidng for 2010 and are both very excited!
Here’s a picture of us a few minutes after getting engaged (more and bigger photos to follow on my Flickr):
All this stuff has got me thinking more about the future so I’m trying to do the following:
- Plan my wedding and try to find a marital home for my fiancee and I. Also, buy a very cute puppy for us to have.
- Nail the currently freelancing I’m currently doing for my secret dream employer so that it will become a permanent position.
- Not install Linux on my new Macbook as it’s not fully working yet and I want to try and avoid wasting time fiddling and force myself to help the KDE Mac project.
- Stop wasting time messing unnecessarily with my computers when they work fine. Stop reading blogs that aren’t incredibly interesting. Stop following people on Twitter that aren’t incredibly interesting. Possibly stop using Twitter altogether for this reason
Generally I just want to try and start to make the most of my life a bit more, focusing on the things in life that matter (my faith, my fiancee and meeting actual goals with KDE/bass-guitar-playing rather than messing about).
It’s a bit of a random time for resolutions but hopefully this is a time when I can turn over a new leaf and start being a bit more useful again. If I’ve not achieved anything public in music or software in a few months then I want someone to slap me!
Posted in My Life
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February 18, 2009 @ 22:21
Normally I despise these things but I found this a fairly interesting Facebook meme to be going round at the moment.
Rules: Once you’ve been “tagged”, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be “tagged” (on Facebook). You have to “tag” the person who “tagged” you. If I “tagged” you, it’s because I want to know more about you. (I’ve only “tagged” people on Facebook).
- I’ve been seeing my girlfriend (Lindsay) since we were both at school. She is amazing and I’m a very, very lucky man.
- I treat life like a software problem. I’m convinced there must be some algorithm for “solving” all the world’s problems.
- I became a Christian at 17 but wasn’t raised going to church.
- I love dogs and hate cats. I want to train all the world’s dogs to eat the world’s cats.
- I exfoliate and moisturise. I am/will be mocked for this but don’t care because my skin is awesome.
- If I ever couldn’t be a software engineer any more I’d become a full-time bass player.
- I have my nipple pierced, resulting in the nickname “Nipples” at school. Most people called me that rather than my name, including a fair few of the teachers.
- Cycling has been my main method of transport for about 10 years so I have an strong dislike of bus drivers and people who beep their horn.
- Deus Ex is my favourite computer game. It is incredible and and you should play it even if you don’t play games. It is a work of art.
- I hate tea and coffee.
- I think of myself as Scottish before British.
- I constantly wish I had enough time to try and help everyone through all their problems.
- I look forward to being married but fear becoming a parent too young.
- Sometimes when I meet random people on nights out I like to convince them I have a really bizarre job. Last time was a paramedic for domestic pets.
- I was one interview away from joining the British Army’s Infantry.
- I have landed a plane. (In real life, not just in a computer game.)
- I think Babylon 5 is possibly the best piece of TV or film ever made and if you disagree then you are wrong.
- I can’t cry and haven’t done so for over three years. This slightly worries me.
- I care very little what random new people think of me unless I’m in a situation like an interview or my good impression means a lot to my coworker/friend/girlfriend/family member.
- I’ve known I was going to work with computers since primary school.
- I think if you are not Scottish you shouldn’t be allowed to wear a kilt (possibly by law).
- My music collection contains almost no female artists, probably because most of it is progressive rock.
- One of the most endearing things someone can do to me is take the piss out of me.
- I relish all criticism as one of my goals in life is to improve myself as much as possible in every area.
- I generally hate romantic comedies unless they have John Cusack in them and then I irrationally love them.
Posted in My Life, Random
9 Comments »