Three friends, Dave Cross, Greg McCarroll and Josette Garcia, met at YAPC Europe in Lisbon wanting to update the world on the status of Perl. As Damian Conway, one of the key designers of Perl 6 was giving a talk, we thought we should ask him a few questions. The following questions took a long time to put together,...
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Gavin Bell is a key figure on the London developer scene. I first came across him when he showed me to the O’Reilly stand at Open Tech at Hammersmith, filling me in on the day’s events with his gentle Northern Irish brogue. I have seen him present half a dozen times and he’s never less than engaging, illuminating and...
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O’Reilly’s Josette Garcia had a cosy chat with Alex Martelli. Together they discussed the past and future of Python, Martelli’s role at Google, what he misses about Italy, working with his wife and how he feels about Erlang: Q. 1) Python 3000! What is the story behind this huge number? A. It started as an in-joke, back at the...
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Maker Faire was the most open, buzzing, hearty, heart-warming, dazzling and jaw-dropping display of invention, innovation, creativity, geekery and genial eccentricity you could ever wish to come across. It was a hardware hacking fest of the highest order. I was on the Make stand with my colleagues Graham Cameron, Simon Chappell, Alice Anderson and Josette Garcia. Between serving customers, we...
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Rachel Davies is the co-author of Agile Coaching, written in conjunction with Liz Sedley, which was published by Pragmatic Programmers. Rachel is a director of the Agile Alliance and the Principle Agile Coach for Agile Experience. I spoke to her at QCon about her book, about Agile Development, how Agile Coaching works and why Agile Coaches are in the...
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Christian Crumlish is the curator of the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library and co-author of Designing Social Interfaces. Christian spoke in London and Berlin in January 2010, when he kindly agreed to be interviewed: CS: What was your route into technology? What were your founding interests that have proven useful over the years? CC: I was fascinated by computers at...
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A short video from Maker Faire, Newcastle 2010:
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Internet live event! Launch and flight of meteo hot air balloon – from Codebits to Spacebits! As I am sure you are aware, I like codebits, the yearly meeting in Lisbon – 72 hours non stop of overdosing on pizzas, coke/red bull and of course code. Talks, Workshops, Quizzes, Fun and of course CODE – it is all there!...
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Dave Cross is the Techie’s Techie. He co-wrote Perl Template Toolkit for O’Reilly and Data Munging with Perl for Manning. His Perl Teach-In at the BBC sold out its 50 places in a day, with another 40 people joining the waiting list in just a few days more – there’s untapped demand out there! Dave kindly submitted to an...
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UK-based Steve Bowbrick has been involved with the web since its early years. He has broken new ground in a host of projects, notching up a World’s First and at least one UK’s First, and he shows no signs of stopping. He kindly agreed to expose himself to the full force of the harrowing GMT interview assault, and survived...
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The changes in South Africa over the last few years have been possibly greater as those in any other country on the planet. We asked Cape Town-based Web Entrepreneur Dirk Tolken for his take on the Tech Scene in South Africa: Who are you? What do you do? How big is your operation? What’s your role? My name is...
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Deb Bassett is a freelance Rails developer based in Otley in West Yorkshire. She is a mainstay of the Leeds tech scene and the organiser of the Leeds GeekUp. I interviewed her the day after the inaugural Geek-Up in Leeds, and a couple of weeks before her marriage to Rob Lee, who is also an Otley-based developer. CS: What’s...
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I was at Manchester Polytechnic between 1986 and 1989, playing about with online chemistry abstracts and yet not quite realising the potential that lay at my fingers. Manchester is a great city to live in, with the facilities of a major conurbation but the feel of a small town, and it has a fantastic tech pedigree. The city is...
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Antonio Bonanno is a resident of Milan, Italy. He is one half, along with Giorgio Montersino, of Digital Natives, a start-up created to help Italian companies put together a Social Networking business strategy. I met him through Franceso D’Orazio after the first Social Media Lab at IULM, when, after he and Giorgio had driven us around the city, he...
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Gordon Guthrie is CEO/CTO of hypernumbers.com, an early stage semi-stealth start-up. He has previously had a range of senior technical and business positions including Chief Technical Architect at if.com and more recently as Solutions Architect at BT/City of Edinburgh Council. I bumped into Gordon at FOWA in London a few months ago, and asked him to write an article...
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Kris Buytaert has been a prolific contributor to GMT for the last six months, bringing news of the goings-on from the heart of Europe, beside writing for his own blog, Everything is a Freaking DNS Problem. He is a long time Linux and Open Source Consultant doing Linux and Open Source projects in Belgium, Europe and the rest of...
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Develer Srl was founded in 2001 by the young and dynamic Simone Zinanni and was joined later on by Giovanni Bajo. Develer’s offices are situated in the heart of Tuscany in a little town north-west of the magnificent city of Florence. Simone started developing at the ripe old age of 12 and became a C++ developer/programmer – he is...
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It is cold, it is raining, I am in Roma. It is JavaDay IV at the Engineering Faculty of the University of RomaTre on January 30th. The bad weather did not stop people turning up – over 1600 came to listen to 30 experts in their field. The talks were divided into 6 tracks – What’s Hot; Object-Oriented and...
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Ignite London 2 was a roaring success. From Cory Doctorow’s polemic about the BBC introducing DRM to High Definition at the start to Tom Scott’s SciFi story Mob at the end, there wasn’t a dull moment the entire evening. The speakers were knowledgeable, interesting, funny, thought-provoking, eloquent, accomplished. The audience were generous, patient, aware, ready to laugh, ready to...
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Paul ‘Vagueware’ Robinson writes: There is a real buzz all over Europe at the moment about “Open Data” initiatives where repositories of information are made available for exploration by the general public. Of course, it’s not sufficient to just make the data available – there is a growing need for new tools to explore datasets, perhaps similar to Google’s...
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I went along to see Christian Crumlish speak at Covent Garden Wallacespace. Christian is the curator of the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library and co-author of Designing Social Interfaces, and he did a fine hour-long talk (plus questions) about how design patterns can be used for building social websites. My notes, incomplete as they are, read: Patterns originated in the...
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The flagship branch of Foyles on Charing Cross Road in London is a fantastic shop with a magnificent computing section. It is arguably the biggest section in the UK, maybe in all of Europe, possibly in the World, W & G Foyle Ltd 113-119 Charing Cross Road LondonWC2H 0EB Fax: 020 7434 1580 Email: orders@foyles.co.ukMapwith the equivalent of 70+...
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Here’s an interview I did at Erlang Factory with Mark Imbriaco of 37Signals about Campfire. Among the high end topics we discussed – how did Campfire come about, how was it written, how do the rest of 37Signals regard it, what Mark is learning this year and, most importantly of all, who would win in a fight between Erlang...
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At the last Erlang Factory in London, I interviewed Senior Erlang Consultant Michal Slaski and Creator of the Nitrogen Framework Rusty Klophaus about how Erlang Web Framework and Nitrogen can work together. And this seems an apt time to remind you about Erlang User Conference 2009 in Sweden, Stockholm from the 12 Nov 2009 to 12 Nov 2009.
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Dux Raymond Sy is the author of SharePoint for Project Management. Here he is to tell us a little bit about it: What is your background, technologically speaking? I have a degree in Telecommunications Engineering and my first foray into IT was actually programming Motorola chips in Assembly programming language. I later evolved and have worked with higher-level programming...
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Madlab is Manchester Digital Laboratories: … a 1000 sq. ft. former shop in the Northern Quarter – open Thursday-Sunday from 10am-late (plus other evenings when there’s an event happening). It’s a space you can get together with like-minded individuals and work on your urban gardening, crochet, hacking, programming, media arts, filmmaking, animating project without worrying that you’re in a...
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A few days before he spoke at XTech in Paris, I asked Xavier Cazin of O’Reilly Editions to talk us through the Parisian Tech scene: Paris seems a great place to be a techie at the moment, with XTech just around the corner. Is that the case? Has that always been the case? Does Paris and France have a...
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November’s iPhone and Smartphone Publisher and Developer Night was another triumph, an Augmented Reality Special. 24 was kitted out in its Christmas garb, and once again thanks to Yuza Mobile for loan of the space. An audience of about 100 people turned out to see two excellent presenters: Ravi Damani is the co-Founder of acrossair. He talked about his...
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It was my pleasure to attend the – hopefully inaugural – Open Hardware Conference at NESTA in Plough Place in London. The event was jointly organised by NESTA, Open Business and 40 Fires, the foundation behind the Open Source car, Riversimple. Christian Alhert of Minibar fame was MC for the day. Roland Harwood of NESTA did a quick introduction/greeting....
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How many techies does it take to build an elephant tower? Result :– This elephant is, of course, the mascot of PHP. Attending the International PHP Conference in Barcelona, I was surrounded by these lovely cuddly toys. As you can well imagine, the conference, organized by the PHP Barcelona User Group, was not for the soft-hearted but for the...
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Codebits – the fun event for all techies. Inspired by Hackday, London, Celso Marthino and Pedro Custodio, both then from Sapo.pt, decided two years ago to create Codebits in Lisbon. This year Pedro was not with us but Jose Castro did a super job. Almost 700 techies lined up on Thursday 3rd December for the opening of the third...
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The following interview with CouchDB creators Chris Anderson and Noah Slater took place in May 2009, before their book, CouchDB: The Definitive Guide (written in conjunction with fellow CouchDB creator Jan Lehnardt) was published. The Rough Cut had just been released. CouchDB: Rough Cuts Version has now been out for several months and the book should be published in...
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Back in 2008, Jeremy Coates was in the middle of organising his first big tech conference, an event which turned out to be PHPNW08, when he kindly answered a few questions about how a newbie approaches such a daunting project. Who are you? What do you do? Hi, I’m Jeremy Coates, I’m the MD of Solution Perspective Media in...
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Our first Ignite was a massive success, from our point of view. I can’t believe it went as well as it did. There were a couple of hiccups here and there, there were things we should have done differently but I think it was a pretty good show for a first attempt. Certainly, the list of speakers was tremendous,...
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Flash Camp Birmingham is set to take place on the 7th September 2010, from noon till 8pm, in the...
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OpenTech is the benchmark of what one-day developer conferences can be: OpenTech 2010 is an informal, low cost, one-day...
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After the success of Ignite Londons 1 and 2, we are pleased to announce the imminent arrival of Ignite...
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Francesco Pallanti writes: After a period of radio silence here we are back on air more resolute than ever!...
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O’Reilly author John Smart, (Java Power Tools) is across in the UK from New Zealand and will give two...
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DevCon London takes place on 27th – 29th September in West London at the Novotel London West. It is...
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JAX London – the Java, Enterprise Architecture, Agile & SOA Conference – will take place between the 27th–29th September...
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Think *inside* the box for a change: Want to understand what is inside the box or build your own...
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