May 7, 2008 @ 12:14
I’ve recently left BT and joined a start-up called Mendeley. I’m now writing Qt code for a living which will hopefully benefit my KDE contribution’s quality and hopefully my work on KDE will benefit Mendeley. I’ve moved to London for the job, hence the decreased number of blog posts lately and my vanishing from the internet. I hope to get back to blogging and doing KDE work when the dust settles but let’s hear some more about what I’m doing.
Mendeley is providing a tool for managing academic and research knowledge, allowing people to be able to better find and manage academic papers and use a network of others to avoid mundane tasks when trying to seek academic knowledge. There will also be interesting benefits for those producing papers as well.
This consists of a desktop Qt application (for Windows/Mac/Linux and maybe other Qt supported platforms) which can plug into your Mendeley.com account and allows metadata to be gathered and shared. The desktop application and web application usage will remain free-as-in-beer but the desktop client will be (at least initially) proprietary.
We’re also looking for a talented PHP/Javascript developer with database experience (preferably MySQL) to join the team based in Central London. You will have a lot of responsibility from the beginning and must be passionate about the problems Mendeley are trying to solve and using social networks to solve them (*cough* Web 2.0! *cough*). You can read the full job advert on Mendeley’s site.
Although this may look like a blatant plug it’s also because I believe the sort of people that read a fairly technical blog like this may be more suitable for the position than on a random jobs board.
I’m enjoying Mendeley a lot so far. I’ve been able to make a real difference in my first two days and the other guys are great fun to work with and I look forward to learning more about academic research and Qt in the coming months!
Posted in My Life, Software Development
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March 23, 2008 @ 21:13
I’ve now actually reordered the categories into stuff I actually use.
My past posts and future ones are/will be broken down by:
The above links point to the relevant category. I highly recommend if you read this blog and only some of the above interest you that you subscribe to only the RSS feed for that particular category or categories for your sake and mine.
Posted in My Life, Random
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February 14, 2008 @ 09:18
I hope you all have a great day and even if you don’t have someone to share it with or a card from a mystery person that you can still feel loved and appreciated by those you care about.
If you know of anyone who feels a bit lonely or disappointed on this day of the year why not give them a call and tell them how much you care for them.
What am I doing today? I’ve had a discussion with the Oxygen designers and they’ve agreed that it is OK to change the default Oxygen theme for KDE 4.1 from white-based to pink-based! Have a nice day!
[The statements made in the above paragraph may not be true. If you quote them you are an idiot. All rights reserved, all lefts are free.]
Posted in My Life
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February 5, 2008 @ 23:49
I went to Osnabrueck this weekend for my second KDE meeting, the first being Akademy. This felt pretty different because I am now not less of a complete noob when it comes to Qt/KDE programming. It was nice in a smaller setting to get to know some of the IRC nicks a bit better and really got me on fire for working harder and longer on KDE.
I mostly hacked on my blogging kresource at the weekend and a little bit on the kblog library, making some bugfixes and fixing some segfaults. A gotcha I found with Qt programming is that you need to be very, very careful about your timing of deleting objects as if you are an idiot like me you will forget that the object has slots (callbacks for non-Qt people) which will try to access it and then bite you in the arse. That problem alone wasted about 10 hours hacking time!
Germany was cool, everyone I met spoke great English and was very helpful. I felt mildly embarrassed that I didn’t speak any German beyond “Ya” and “Nein” but no-one made me feel like the ignorant Brit that I am.
It has been my first time meeting lots of new people since I moved to Ipswich. I found the need, when asked where I was from, to say “Scotland” but that I now live in Ipswich. I think I could live here 70 years and I’d still think of myself as Scottish first and foremost.
It was exciting to be involved in some of the meetings, even if I didn’t have much to contribute. KDEPIM 4.1 will be a great release with a lot of cool things coming in from KDAB and the enterprise branch and the beginnings of Akondai starting to emerge. It’ll be nice for me to have some actual GUI code that users will directly interact with in a major KDE release also and I look forward to moving my desktop full-time to KDE4 as currently I have to flick backwards and forwards.
Anyway, a big shout out to the KDEPIM guys, thanks for a great weekend and a pleasure to meet you all!
Posted in My Life, Software Development
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