During the weekend of 1-2 June 2013, The University of Southampton will be one of the satellite cities as part of the global Random Hacks of Kindness Event!

Click here for the detailed programme

Twitter hashtag: #rhoksoton

* Updates:

• We are proud and very grateful to announce that Google is kind enough to help with sponsoring food and prizes. They Join Enterprise at the UoS, Microsoft Gadgeteer, and ATASS.
• We will have a couple of short talks during the event:
  • Mark Lunney from London Google Developer Group
  • Jack Townsend from CleanwebUK
  • Justine MacKinnon, founder of CrisismappersUK
  • Benjie Gillam, founder of SoMakeIt

For those who don’t know, a RHoK (founded by Google, Microsoft, Nasa, and others) is all about bringing domain experts, programmers, and makers together for a weekend in order to solve problems related to humanity and international development. They are an awesome way to learn something new, test your skills, meet new people, and do something for the good of the world (for more details see The RHoK FAQ).

We can still use more subject experts and sponsors. If you have a problem that falls within the RHoK scope and would like to have a bunch of smart people work on it: tell me and come along! Likewise, if you are a company or institution, how about giving your image a boost by sponsoring some pizza, t-shirts, merchandise, or a prize.

So if you are in the area and you think this sounds interesting please do register. You do not have to be a programmer to participate! In particular we also want to invite people who are into hardware, sensors, electronics, 3D printing, etc. But even if you are not a technical person there are still many ways you can contribute.

Any further tips, questions, ideas, suggestions….get in touch!

–Dirk

Of course there are lots of questions to be raised about the use of unmanned systems (and remotely piloted aircraft in particular) in military conflict. These topics have been, and still are, debated at length in the media, wikipedia, and blogs such as DroneWarsUK. Instead, like Drones For Good, I will focus on some of the positive projects the technology has enabled in the humanitarian, environmental, and social space. I am not the only one who would welcome more balanced coverage here.

What follows is a list of the main projects I found to be active in the environmental / humanitarian space. If there are particular projects I have missed (and I’m certain there are) do let me know via the comments.

• OpenRelief: a project started by Shane Coughlan that aims to develop better communications tools for disaster relief. They are building a fully open source airframe that can be used for quickly mapping disaster areas and carrying radiation and smoke detectors among other sensors. 
• Conservation Drones:  Here the mission is to share knowledge for building low-cost drones to help conservation workers and researchers in developing countries do their jobs a lot more effectively and cost efficiently. The focus is on low-cost avionics and airframes that you can easily assemble yourself and on applications in surveying and mapping forests and biodiversity. Founded at ETH Zurich, users include WWF, RSPB, Greenpeace, and the team is closely affiliated with Research Drones. 
• ShadowView: a non profit that provides effective and efficient Unmanned Aerial Systems for non-profit and civilian operations. Key potential areas of operation are: conservation, search and recovery, infrastructure monitoring, civilian security, transport, and media filming. They have two fixed wing airframes (of which the OpenRanger one is based upon the AirRanger from SPOTS International) and one mulicopter UAV. OpenPilot is used as the autopilot. 
  
  
• Matternet: a startup working on implementing an autonomous transport system for delivery of high-value goods (pharmaceuticals, electronics) to developing countries and/or rugged locations where the roads are so few and/or terrible that UAVs become the superior option. Their idea is for drone transportation to leapfrog trucks in those areas in the same way the cell phones leapfrogged land lines. 

Together these form a nice set of examples of the potential benefits UAS technology can bring. This only adds to the huge potential there is for the technology in general civil applications (already well under way).

Finally, from an educational standpoint there is the enormous creative potential of resources like DIY Drones, Lets Build Robots, and projects such as Ardupilot and OpenROV. Together with things like Raspberry-Pi and Parallella the amount of (educational) fun to be had for just a few hundred bucks is stellar.

I really need more time.

–Dirk

We were already honoured to be selected as one of the 10 finalists and the news that we were also one of the 3 final winners was fabulous. Congratulations for those of the team that put in all the hard work to get us here. Congratulations also to the two other grand finalists: mSchool and  SunClean. Members of each of the three teams were given tours around Silicon Valley last week.

So great news for Taarfia and its nice to feel the momentum. The road ahead is still long and challenging but its been amazing to see how much has been achieved already.

As Mark Iliffe always so aptly says, Onwards!

–Dirk

A shot post to say that I am co-organizing a Raspberry Pi workshop with The IET Solent Branch at the University of Southampton on 25 April. For personal reasons I cannot make it myself that day but do go along if you want to learn about how to use the GPIO pins on your Pi board!

Btw, if you can’t make it but live in the area, do checkout somakeit.org.uk. Recently launched and we now have a space!

–Dirk

My current list has evolved considerably since then and the purpose of this post is to give an overview of the shows I’m currently subscribed to and why. Hopefully it may inspire others to listen to some of them and share their own.

The different subscriptions cover my interests in technology & software, programming, (aerospace) engineering, and socio-economic/political topics. As well as a broader interest in science related topics and the scientific method.

Why

There is no point giving a list of podcasts without some background. What do I want to get out of it:

• Get in depth background and commentary on new tools/projects/paradigms in the tech/software sphere
• Learn more about the people and the story behind well known tech projects or sites (e.g., Rich Hickey, Jeff Atwood, …)
• Follow developments in the engineering and manufacturing sectors, particularly aerospace.
• Get more background and commentary on current affairs and important socio-economic and political developments.
• Infotainment and amusement

I try to keep a general tab on what’s happening through Twitter and a NewsBlur subscription list (which I admittedly have difficulty following though). For me podcasts fill in the back story and provide context and critique. Whatever I listen to, it will always have some technical content, I don’t tend to stick with shows that have a lot of radio-show-esque waffle.

My podcast listening tends to happen whenever I commute or while doing the usual chores around the house (typically washing dishes). This gives me about 20-45 minutes of listening every day and limits the total number of shows I can keep track of. I’m currently somewhat oversubscribed so in the spirit of The Disciplined Pursuit of Less I’m looking to prune this list somewhat, or at least be more picky as to which episodes I listen to.

Podcast list

So here is my current list, in no particular order:

Tech / Programming

Floss Weekly (1hr, interview, weekly) – This show is one of my favourites. Originally started by Leo Laporte and now hosted by Randall Schwartz with co-hosts varying between Aaron Newcomb, Simon Phipps (of OSI fame and lives just down the road here) and Dan Lynch. As the name suggests each episode covers an open source project, interviewing the developers about the backstory, userbase, toolchain, upcoming features, etc. There is a nice mix of projects ranging from the very well known to the more obscure. Some examples are Yesod (a haskell web framework), OpenROV (an open underwater robot platform), Err chatbot (an IRC chatbot), and PostgreSQL (a database server). Very accessible and light to listen to. Also always amusing to hear Simon Phipps give guests a hard time if their open source model is not up to scrutiny.

Software Engineering Radio (~1hr, interview, monthly) – This show has been around since 2006 and discusses software engineering principles and best practices in quite some detail. Dryer than, say, Floss Weekly and less buzzy than IT Conversations its a solid, organized listen, always in the form of an interview. Previous topics included lean software development, agile methods, design patterns (with Erich Gamma), DSLs (with Martin Fowler), and UML (with Grady Booch). I have to admit, though, that it has lost its charm and quirckiness after Markus Voelter left and the show got taken over IEEE Software in 2012.

Basement Coders (~1hr, interview, every 2-3 months) – I only discovered Basement Coders very recently but quickly came to like it. Craig Tataryn knows what he is talking about and while there is a slight bias towards the JVM ecosystem topics are drawn from a wide range of software engineering and programming disciplines. Past topics have included OSGi, SpringSource, Scala and also a recommended interview with Jeff Atwood. The style is somewhere in between Floss Weekly and Software Engineering Radio. My only niggle is that they always end the show by asking the guest to say “Stay geeky my friends”, which for me just detracts from the style and content. May I suggest a famous, inspring quotation instead?

RCE (~1 hr, interview, monthly) – RCE is an HPC podcast, and what I really like about it is that it’s run by two very experienced and adept hosts: Brock Palen and Jeff Squyres. These guys know what they are talking about and that makes for high quality interviews with good technical content. Topics are always related to High Performance Computing, eg., the Ceph filesystem, The Fastest Fourrier Transfer in the West, Modern Fortran, Globus, and (of course) DataKind.

Herding Code (~30 min, interview/discussion, monthly) – If the Basement Coders hosts have a Java background then the Herding Code hosts (Jon Galloway, Keven Dente, Scott Allen, Scott Koon) have a .NET interest. Similar topics are covered in a similar informal and informative style: new tools, APIs, best practices, etc. typically from, or related to, the Microsoft ecosystem. Though some more general topics are covered as well like hiring and interviewing strategies.

IT Conversations (10min-1hr, mixed, multiple per week discontinued) – When preparing to publish this post I just noticed that the podcast has stopped. For those interested in the back episodes: Of all the podcasts in this list IT conversations has the most buzz words. Mostly recordings from large IT conferences (Velocity, Strata, Web 2.0, O’Reilly, …) you will find plenty of business speak, product pitches, and keynotes. Again you miss the visual feed but talks are typically well delivered, amusing, and thus lighter than those listed above. Occasionally the feed also features interviews by Moira Gunn, typically interviewing an author about an upcoming book with a social/medical/techy angle, staying rather high level. While she tends to annoy me at times, there is some good content here and there.

The Changelog (40min, interviews/news roundup, twice per month) – You may know the changelog from its site, thechangelog.com, which is a source of news about what happens in open source. They also run a podcast, led by Adam Stacoviak and Wynn Netherland and in style quite similar to Herding code. Each episode will cover a particular open source project. The topics are quite varied but tend to focus on web development related topics with Ruby/Rails projects and javascript frameworks being the most prominent. Past projects have included Event Machine, Cloud 9, Celluloid, MacRuby, Lua, Travis CI, and Tmux. In all easy to follow and agreeable to listen to. Its been a while since the last episode though.

Chariot Techcast (30min, interviews, bi-monthly) – Chariot Solutions are an enterprise application development consulting firm with a strong focus on open source. They also run a number of podcasts of which their Emerging TechCast is the only one I have listened to. I haven’t listened to very many espisodes but its similar to basement coders but a bit more enterprisey. Hosted by their Director of Education, Ken Rimple, it tends to focus on JVM technologies (e.g., Spring, Scala, iText) but has also covered projects like MongoDB, Redis, and Jenkins. They also extend the discussion beyond the projects themselves and some episodes will cover architecture, platforms, best practices, etc.

Relevance Podcast (~40 min, interviews, 1-2 a month) – I have have been dabbling in clojure a bit lately and enjoy Fogus’s quirky twitter feed. Wanting to learn more about the people and philosophy behind the language I started listening to the Relevance Podcast. Think Relevance is probably the main company behind the language and as such its quite a focussed show, typically discussing particular clojure projects, libraries, or events (e.g., “The Conj”) and you don’t always get the references to individuals or company culture. However, even if you are not really into clojure, interviews with Michael Fogus and Rich Hickey are well worth listening to. A nice quirk of the show is that they let every guest choose the intro and outro music for the episode.

University of Washington TV (~1hr, presentations, ?) – I stumbled across UWTV while looking for a podcast in the computational science / CAE domain. The feed consists of recordings from invited lectures and typically cover computer science research. The talks are quite accessible and make for very interesting listening. The only downside is that you miss the visual backup the physical audience has. Past topics have included real time crowd computing, swarm intelligence, GraphLab, and a keynote from Bill Gates. Its been a while since any new episodes were posted and in writing this I could no longer find a new feed through iTunes. The previous episodes are still worth a listen though.

Hanselminutes (30min, interviews/conversation, weekly) – Scott Hanselman, program manager at Microsoft’s developer team and listed as one of the 30 most influential people in programming, is a well known character in the tech world. There is obviously a strong focus on the Microsoft ecosystem but don’t let that put you off if that’s not your thing. There are some good interviews and discussions on other topics as well, such as the evolution of web Malaware, a discussion of TypeScript, and an interview with Willow Brugh (from Geeks Without Bounds fame). I dont listen to all episodes but I generally enjoy it as it has this relaxed, personal vibe about it and touches on the more personal stories behind a particular technology or development. Nicely mixed it makes for easy listening.

This Developers Life (~1hr, storytelling, ~5 a year) – So far the podcasts have always had a very strong technical focus. What makes This Developers Life interesting is that it focusses much more on the personal side of being in tech. Hosts are Scott Hanselmann and Rob Conery and there are lots of interesting stories, anecdotes and guests. Topics have included: handling drama, growing old, learning new things, dealing with cancer, the role of education, etc. So very much a personal, human angle. Like Hanselminutes it is all very expertly mixed and makes it very easy and chilled out to listen to.

Current affairs

BBC Analysis (~30min, commentary, weekly) – Every week the BBC analysis team will do a short documentary on recent events. Topics will typically be from Economics (e.g., Eurocrisis, the US fiscal cliff, …) and politics (e.g., the Arab spring, the Alawite in Syria). The bias of the presenter (writer, journalist, or academic) seeps through at times but overall they are quite well done and easy to follow. As welcome intermezzos feature The Philosophers Arms and extracts of debates at the LSE.

As for the latter, the list of LSE Podcasts available on the iTunes store is staggering. Lots of very interesting material covering socio-economic and political themes (both past and present) presented in the form of debates, public lectures or interviews. Its hopeless trying to keep up with it all so I try to cherry pick a few interesting sounding episodes here and there.

Science / Engineering / Skepticism

BBC Discovery (~20min, documentary, 2-5 per month) – Documentary style, similar to Analysis, but covering popular science topics like Artificial Blood, Gene Therapy, Drug Discovery, Alan Turing, etc. A bit too frequent for my liking, so more work to keep up with, but easy listening.

Strange Quarks (~40-90min, interview, 6 per year) – I have tried a number of skeptic podcasts and to my knowledge Strange Quarks is the best one out there. Excellent, lengthy interviews by Marting Robbins and Michael Marshall of people like Mark Henderson (The Geek Manifesto), Stevyn Colgan, and Mark Lynas. Covering topics such as climate change, crime, and conspiracy theories. Hasn’t been a new episode in 8 months now, but the older ones are definitely worth listening to.

IEEE Spectrum Techwise Conversations (~10-40min, interview, > 10 per month) – Short, frequent, but always very interesting and great during short chores or commutes. Topics are very diverse, from job market discussions to machine translation. It being IEEE you expect solid content, not shying away from the technical and not trying to be too “popularizing”. Though the episodes are generally quite short and can leave you wanting, Steven Cherry manages to pull this off very well in the telephone interviews he almost always does.   Unfortunately, for me, the episodes with Susan Hassler are less successful at this. It feels like she (or the production team) are trying to hard to make it interesting or accessible and it almost feels patronizing. So I end up skipping most of those.

Aero Society Podcast (30-60min, lectures, 1-2 per month) – The Royal Aeronautical Society (or RAeS) is a British-founded multidisciplinary professional institution dedicated to the global aerospace community. So if you are interested in aerospace these are a great listen. Typically around the hour mark they are recordings of (named) lectures given by prominent people in the aerospace community. Topcis covered have included the history of flight simulation, the Curiosity rover, Anglo-American defense, hot air balloons (a wonderful talk by, the now unfortunately deceased, Janet Folks), aerodynamic technology, etc. I just wish they would include the Q&A session at the end of each lecture as well.

Aviation Xtended (60-120min, interviews, features, and discussion, monthly) – A very new addition to my list. So far I have only listened to the last episode (on Space Exploration, Space Travel, and Moondust) and while its very long (over two hours) its well worth it. The podcast is run by Pieter Johnson (XTP Media), Tim Robinson (RAeS), Gareth Stringer (Global Aviation Resource) and features a mix of interviews, news updates, book reviews, and general discussion among the hosts about all things aerospace.

Entertainment

The Infinite Monkey Cage (~30min, panel discussion, ~1 per month) – Comedy meets science meets absolute mayhem. Panel discussion with two scientists and one comedian, led by Robin Ince and Brian Cox. Each episode tackles a particular topic (“Is cosmology really a science?”) and features lots of inside jokes that only science geeks will get, references to British culture, media personalities, and a good dose of absurdness. An absolute joy to listen to.

Answer Me This (Helen and Olly) (~30min, Q&A, 1 per week) – Every week, assisted by Soundman Martin Austwick, Helen Zaltzman and Olly Mann answer random questions submitted by the general public. And with random I mean truly random. From hairspray and rainbow parties to relationships and mounted police. Pure entertainment sprinkled with random interesting facts brought by an amusing trio in an equally amusing format. The show has become one of the UKs most successful independently produced podcasts and won a number of awards.

Not on the list 

Not on the list is Pragmatic Podcasts, not updated since 2011 but some good back episodes and interviews to listen to.

Some of the popular podcasts I tried but didn’t resonate with me: Nerdist, BBC Comedy, Ricky Gervais, Weekly Pulse-Project, and Programming Throwdown.

I did follow Pulse Project Maths for a while but there was not always enough real content to keep me going. A less frequent schedule may work better for them.

To check out

Podcasts I discovered recently and am keen to checkout include Omega Tau (English version, looks very promising and diverse), The Engineering Commons, Compucast, and, to satisfy my inner #avgeek, Talking Space and Airplane Geeks. Will have to see which ones they will replace.

Conclusion

This post has taken a lot of time to put together and Im quite surprised at how many shows I have listend to over the past year. What I was still missing when I started writing was a good show that covers engineering, particular aerospace/automotive/marine and ideally the bridge with computer science. It looks like I may have found this with Omega Tau and Aviation Xtended.

However, Im still open for suggestions so please leave those, and any comments, below. Any tips on a big data related podcast are also welcome, inside-bigdata perhaps?

–Dirk

The report was chaired by Professor Dominic Tildesley (a University of Southampton alumni by the way) and was commissioned by David Willetts, Minister for Universities and Science. It was triggered by a July 2011 meeting bringing together academics, industrialists, hardware and software suppliers and experts from the Research Councils to discuss the establishment of an e-infrastructure for the UK. The participants concluded at the end of the meeting:

.. we are experiencing a paradigm shift in which the scientific process and innovation are beginning in the virtual world of modelling and simulation before moving to the real world of the laboratory. [... and] that to exploit this revolution we would require a fresh, collaborative approach to software development to bring scientific, industrial and public sector users and hardware and software developers and vendors closer together.

This follow up report outlines a ten-year strategy for the development and management of the UK’s e-infrastructure to support such a strong public-private partnership.

Its an interesting read and talks about the importance of software quite a bit:

The development of software will be at the heart of this new partnership. The investment will help to develop codes based on new ideas for the academic and industrial communities, will port legacy codes to high end machines for advanced simulation and data-intensive computing, will help to make academic software more robust, and will support the transfer of important commercial codes to high end machines.

Another quote:

“It is important to place a higher value upon the position of “scientific programmer” and also “data curator” in the academic environment and to offer more career opportunities to these staff. Scientific programmers combine the knowledge of the underlying scientific discipline with implementation, optimisation and parallelisation for high-end systems: they are important in obtaining highly-efficient application implementation”

So its nice to see they took some of our points on board, pity they did not end up in the recommendations. This did though and I’m not quite sure what to think of it yet:

Drive the development of software for all of the partners in the e-infrastructure. This is fundamental in establishing the value of e-infrastructure for the UK and has needs to be given an equal footing with the purchase of hardware and networking. To achieve this, we should establish a small number of internationally competitive software centres in the UK.

You can read the whole report here. Thoughts?

–Dirk

I have been wrestling with the whole concept of ICT4D for some time and thought it would be a good opportunity to engage with “the experts”.

My slides are below. Though they contain very little text the narrative should be clear from the pictures. As background reading I strongly suggest Can Technology end Poverty from Kentaro Toyama and The Subtle Condescension of “ICT4D” by  Erik Hersman.

The talk itself went very well and there was some good discussion afterwards. I’m still grappling with what I should do next & how I should spend my (limited) time in this area in the future. Tips welcome

My take home from the discussion is that the potential for impact (realizing change) is inversely proportional to the geographic & social distance of the group you are targetting and the dominance of technology in your solution.
Working very closely with “people on the ground” or “real users” can help bridge this gap but it’s very difficult to do.

So the message to me seems to be: think local.

–Dirk

I organized the first Southampton edition in June which was so well received I organized the December edition this past weekend as well. This time with some great help from Alejandro of HackaSoton. For more information on the concept of a RHoK event see the FAQ I wrote earlier.

Footage of the event can be found on Flickr (here and here), Instagram, and Youtube.

Problems

Of the 50 people who registered 32 attended, which, by hackathon standards, is a good turnout. We had a nice space to work in and just the right occupation to give it a cozy, community feel. We kicked off with about 8 problem statements covering such things as adolescent health in Kenya, music therapy for Alzheimers patients, data analysis to improve young lives (from Keyfund), sanitation (presented live from Tanzania), and mapping health services. There was also a presentation by Rich Wilson from import.io, a tool participants could use in their solutions.

Mark Blackwell talking about music therapy for Alzheimers patients.

Hannah Underwood, CEO of Keyfund talking about reaching out to young people.

Attendees then had time to talk to problem owners and select the project that interested them the most. Eventually we had 6 teams working on 6 very different problems and by the time everybody had settled down it was time for lunch.

At this point we had a number of short talks planned: Mark Lunney from London Google Developer Group (who were very kind to sponsor this event), Jack Townsend from CleanwebUK, and Justine MacKinnon, founder of CrisismappersUK.

Unfortunately Justine didn’t manage to make it but I think everybody enjoyed the talks by Mark and Jack.

From then on focus turned to architecture diagrams, flow charts, and laptop screens. A shared Spotify playlist ensured ambient background music, resulting in a very chilled out atmosphere, characteristic of the whole weekend.

A global event

One of the great things about a RHoK is that it’s a global event and this really adds an extra dimension. Every location has a dedicated ustream channel and we had a number of locations projected throughout the weekend as well as a live Twitter feed. We also had a hangout session with some of my fellow compatriots at RHoK Belgium.

RHoK Kenya, RHoK Belgium & Twitter feed

At around 6pm it was time for pizza and a brief intermezzo in the way of a presentation by Benjie Gillam, founder of Southackton, the local hackerspace group. Hacking then continued until 11pm when we had to vacate the building.

Work resumed the next morning at 9am, kicked off by The Lion King opening song, soon followed by David Guetta’s Titanium. Heads started bobbing, feet started tapping, and the chilled out atmosphere soon returned. Another short intermezzo at lunch and a short talk by me on RLabs.

The Leaning Tower of Pizza

The end of lunch marked the start of the sprint towards the final presentations and demos, the atmosphere growing ever more frantic as the deadline approached.

Team Keyfund

Presentations kicked off at 3:30pm and each of the 6 groups was allotted 15mins to show what it is they built. Like last time, judging happend in a peer-to-peer fashion: everybody had to fill out an online score card (a Google Form) for each of the other groups. Results were then averaged and ranked.

Team Jipange presenting their family planning app.

Team Alex and Tom presenting a rhythm training app

The overall winner turned out to be team EnergySource, led by Jack Townsend:

Second place was shared by Mindfull Music (Alzheimer Music therapy, pitched by Mark Blackwell) and Team Alex & Tom (Rhythm training, pitched by Vanessa Cobb of Atass Group). Third place was for Jipange (family planning information and education, pitched by Fiona Ngarachu from the Global South Forum).

Handing out prizes.

The top 4 teams received RHoK T-shirts and the teams in second place each received a Gadgeteer kit, courtesy of Microsoft Research Cambridge. The winning team received RHoK winners T-shirts as well as what was left of the budget, to be spent wisely and in the spirit of RHoK.

Reflecting

It was late when I finally managed to crash in my sofa at home, put my feet up, and reflect upon the event. As an organizer its a lot of running around before, during, and after but seeing everybody happy, well fed, and enjoying themselves always makes it worth it. It was great seeing people connect, share stories, learn, and work together on something useful.

Sure we didn’t solve world hunger. Nor did we forget that technology is just a tiny piece of the overall puzzle and the work done only makes an indirect contribution to the reality on the ground. However…even if many projects stop here (and most do) we must not forget one thing: over the whole global RHoK event more than 3000 people consciously took a weekend off, away from their family and hobbies, to work with a bunch of strangers and donate their skills and expertise to do something for the better. However small or indirect each contribution might be, in each case somebody stood up and actually did something, without expectation of reward. Given the people they met and the ideas they were confronted with, who knows what they may do next.

Thanks

On that note I want to end this blog post with a big final thank you:

• The University of Southampton and Mike Bartlett for ensuring space and equipment
• The sponsors for helping out with food and prizes: Google, Enterprise at the UoS, Microsoft Gadgeteer, ATASS Group, Tangent Web Design

• Alejandro Saucedo for helping out with the organization and providing a soundtrack to the event
• Lisa Harris, Ivan Melendez, Amir Arya, Farahnoosh Berahman, and the rest of the digichamps team for doing such a wonderful job of managing social media, taking pictures, doing video interviews, etc.

• Mark Lunney, Jack Townsend, Benjie Gillam, and Rich Wilson for doing short talks
• All those who registered, attended and put in hard work to have made this a successful event.

And last, but certainly not least, my family for letting me disappear for another weekend in order to make this event happen.

To all the teams: I hope you keep working on your projects and keep me posted. I look forward to seeing you again soon.

–Dirk

]]> http://dirkgorissen.com/2012/12/03/we-rhoked-it-again/feed/ 2 dgorissen rhokall Mark Blackwell talking about music therapy for Alzheimers patients. Hannah Underwood, CEO of Keyfund talking about reaching out to young people. RHoK Kenya & Twitter feed The Leaning Tower of Pizza Team Keyfund Team Jipange Team Alex and Tom presenting their rhythm training app awards sponsors Screenshot from 2012-12-03 17:01:31 ellierhok http://dirkgorissen.com/2012/11/28/learning-doing-talking-whats-your-balance/ http://dirkgorissen.com/2012/11/28/learning-doing-talking-whats-your-balance/#comments Wed, 28 Nov 2012 23:30:37 +0000 dgorissen http://dirkgorissen.com/?p=828 Continue reading →]]> Part of calling oneself a software engineer (though that itself has been the subject of debate for a long time: e.g., here, here, here, and here) is the knowledge that you always have to keep learning and evolving if you want to remain credible and relevant.

I don’t think software engineering or computer science is particularly unique in that respect though. Sure things change very quickly, but only if you get carried away by the buzz. You often hear the following “After about five years your computer science degree is worthless“. My response is then, “Well then you certainly went to the wrong place to get a degree“. But more about that later.

Over the past year or two I have been thinking a lot about this and about what I want. As a result I have been engaging much more consciously with my profession (itself a debate) and trying to be a good member. This post collects my thoughts and experiences thereof and was triggered by the recent discussion between Michael Fogus and Hacker News. With this post I hope to collect some personal stories and approaches people use to make the tradeoffs discussed below.

Fundamentally I believe a software engineer (or whatever you want to call yourself) has three fundamental things he should be doing: Learning, Doing, and Talking.

Learning

Even non techies comment on how fast the IT industry is moving and appreciate the need for continuous development and life long learning. One of the main reasons you are in this game should be because you enjoy learning about new tools, languages, systems, etc. Fogus, who manages to read +70 books a year, is a good example. The great advantage us techies have over, say, vets, is that we are totally spoilt for choice with an unlimited supply of blogs, news portals, books, videos, free online courses, and the oracle that is StackExchange ([1],[2]).

Doing

Secondly, Nicholas Zakas hits the nail right on the head when he says that

“…software engineers aren’t builders. Software engineers are creators.”

And of course the only way to create stuff is to do stuff. The “Engineer” in “Software Engineer” is there for a reason, as is the Software Craftmanship movement. Again, besides the experience you build up in your day job, we are spoilt for choice: from Programming Praxis and Code Golf to over 2,000,000 github repositories to get your hands dirty with. Remember, if you don’t have a pet project, they don’t want you. Not to mention that entrepreneurship and startups are all the rage these days.

Talking

Finally comes Talking. Luckily things have greatly improved but there is still a strong stereotype surrounding those with an affinity for computers in that they lack social skills (see Paul Grahams Why Nerds are Unpopular for an in depth discussion on this). Btw, I was looking for some actual hard research into this but didn’t find anything. Let me know if you do.

The truth of the matter is that a good software engineer will engage with others, go to events, give talks, blog, join hacker groups, network, etc. Most developers work in teams and “strong communication skills” is listed on pretty much every single job advert. So definitely something you should be doing.

A Balancing Act

Ok, so far thats all quite obvious and many others have echoed similar sentiments. The hard part is figuring out how to balance all three. If you are a mortal being without Facebook level stock options or a bankers salary your time and resources are limited. Lists like this and this can be really demotivating. So keeping in mind that the enemy of any creator is context switching how should you allocate your time?

The “Talk is cheap“ mentality advocates doing over talking. While “Its not what you know, but who you know” advocates engaging and talking over doing. Jeff Atwood‘s excellent advice “Do Stuff. Tell People.” advocates both. Similarly most will agree that diving straight into code when taking on a new domain/paradigm (in itself something you should do) is not recommended and an understanding of the underlying principles and philosophy is a prerequisite. On the other hand, as this post or Fogus’ post exemplifies, there are very many good things to be said about learning through doing.

Obviously all are important and unfortunately there is no one true answer for everybody (though participating in an open source project will get you a very long way). Everybody has to make the tradeoff for themselves. However, being able to do that requires a proper understanding of what you like doing, why you do what you do, and what you want out of life. Figure that out and you will have solved the problem as well as able to navigate the avalanche of information that comes at you from all sides. The only thing you can be sure of is that, what ever tradeoff you make, you’d better be in it for the long haul.

As for keeping up with with the the pace that everything moves. The trick is to keep an open and flexible mind while at the same time seeing through the buzz and focusing on the fundamental concepts and ideas. And most of those (as you will learn from listening to people like Rich Hickey or diving into the archive of Communications of the ACM) were laid down long ago.

What about Family?

In the discussion so far there has been one thing missing. A major force in trying to find a good professional balance is your personal situation. I.e., family, children, social life, washing dishes, a house to DIY, a garden to weed, or, *gasp* non computer related hobbies such as sports. In particular children add a totally new dimension which non-parents can’t even start to comprehend. I’m on the same page as Jeff on this one but there is lots of debate.

So what do you do?

So this finally brings me to the primary reason for writing this post. As somebody who is trying to keep learning/doing/talking (I go to dojos, take MOOCs, organize hackathons, give talks, write code, blog, etc.) but is also married with children (< 2y), has a mortgage to pay, and may very soon be leaving the flexible life of academia (something I will blog about separately); I would love to hear about how people in a similar situation go about this.

What balance do you strike and why? What problems have you encountered and how did you deal with them? Or maybe I got it all wrong and you can have it all? There certainly seem to be people who do manage to pull it off somehow.

There are some good stories out there already but Im still interested in more so leave a comment or drop me an email. In particular it would be really interesting if there was some hard research out there looking at this.

–Dirk

Update: Apparently Parlycloud won a special mention during the judging, thanks!

I’m at the 2012 Rewired State Parliament hack weekend. Not with a concrete problem in mind but to observe and learn, similar to the Datadive of two months ago. I was surprised that the format was even more free from than the Datadive. There was no problem facilitation, just a collection of links to various data sources and it was up to the participants to come up with ideas and coalesce into groups.

After poking around at the data somewhat and inspired by the free Parliament tour, I thought I it would be cool to do automatic and dynamic topic mapping of the debate transcripts (or Hansard data as it is referred to). The ideal goal was to have some kind of dynamically changing word cloud or topic map which would allow one to visualize how time was allocated across different topics (health, immigration, science and technology, …) and varied over time.

Unfortunately there was no predefined taxonomy, transcripts were not labelled in any way, and I couldn’t find a different dataset to cross reference with (though I wouldn’t be surprised if there was one). Thus I spent some time looking into the very difficult problem of automatic topic extraction. Probabilistic methods such as Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) and Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) seemed the most popular so I toyed around with various libraries but wasn’t quite happy with the results. With a deadline looming I didn’t want to waste too much time understanding libraries or playing with parameters so eventually I decided to switch to a hosted solution based around Zemanta. I could always swap a custom solution in later but at least I had something working. Other APIs I tried were Yahoo’s content analysis, Alchemy API, and the Open Calais API.

I went with Zemanta as it was quick and easy to obtain a key and the API well documented and easy to understand. Essentially the API provides a suggest capability that, when queried with some text, will return what it thinks are relevant keywords. Particularly useful for me was that it also returns relevant images, articles and categories. That saved me from piping the keywords through a search engine in order to get some more context information. Unfortunately though I found little technical background information as to how the Zemanta service actually works so its a bit of a black box but the results seem sensible.

With Zemanta doing the heavy lifting it was then straightforward to tie it together with the XML Hansard data and provide a simple web frontend with Flask and Bootstrap. The result is a page that shows you the topics, categories, and images for a particular parliamentary debate:

Code is in github and a demo application (seeded with a couple months worth of data) is running on heroku. The topic extraction has more trouble with some debates than others, but overall the themes are there. Still a long way from what I originally had in mind but I thought it was a good place to stop. Also, during this process I connected with another team, led by Mark Smitham, who had been thinking along similar lines and had done similar things. Unfortunately I can’t stay for the final presentations but I’m sure they will come up with something cool. Hopefully I will find some time to continue to work on this in the future.

Thanks to the Rewired State and Tech Hub crew for organizing! Next stop: #rhoksoton!

–Dirk