Phill Barber's Blog

Gunter Dueck - The World after Cloud Computing & Big Data Gunter is a funny and intelligent man with a delivery style I would compare to that of a stand-up comedian.  Some of his content was on dangerous ground, but he also made some very interesting points. Gunter showed a diagram similar to the above which illustrates the choices we face when creating an IT solution, which I'm inclined to agree with. He also showed another diagram which I'll re-create in list form.   Creative. Skilled. Rote work. Robotic work. Gunter made the point that work starts off at the top of this list and gradually works it's way down until eventually it's fully automated.   What I took away...  Make sure your work is as close to the top of the list as possible. Akmal B Chaudri - Next Gen Hadoop: Gather around the campfire and I will tell you a good YARN This talk was aimed at Hadoop novices which was perfect for me and also the rea...

Tim Lister - Forty Years of Teams Or... "Forty years of playing well with others".  A really uplifting talk by Tim introduced us to day two, where we looked at Tim's very interesting career.  The alternative title was given because "one person cannot do anything substantial" and even if you could it's more satisfying saying "we did this!" His IT career started by chance, when he found himself living with Fred Wang at University.  Fred's father, An Wang, was founder of Wang Laboratories  which meant him and Fred had access to more computing power than his entire University.  They used this to analyse data from their fruit fly breeding as part of his Biology degree. Tim was also lucky enough to be mentored by computer scientist  Michael Jackson  who was a "software poet" and produced code so beautiful and lucid, it was as if it were written by aliens. The term "Best practices" can undermine the intellectual wor...

I was lucky enough to go to Q Con London 2014 .  Here is an update of my experience from day 1. Damian Conway - Life, The Universe and Everything Damian is an amazing speaker and made his already fun, interesting, geeky subject, even more fun interesting, and geeky with his great presentational skills. He showed us Perl code (and later Klingonscript) that not only implemented the game of life but also (kind of) disproved Maxwell's Demon . We were also shown an example of a Turing complete machine which was implemented using game of life made by Paul Rendell .  Video also on youtube . This talk reminded me of another cellular automaton I encountered many years ago whilst studying Genetic Algorithms at University.  I am pleased to say that the creator ( David Eck ) has converted the original Java Applet version of his program Eaters, that so impressed me, into javacript available here . What I took away... Coding can and should be fun. Daniel Schauenberg - ...