Last year after watching children run around laughing, Alison and I decided it’s time to have our own kids. A few months later we were checked in to get our first baby scan.

At this point the baby is the the same size as an Apple pip or a Marble.

Fast forward 6 weeks and we are talking Baseballs and Avocados:

The baby (we don’t want to know the sex) is due on the 26th June. Right during the knockout stages of the World Cup. Alison says she’s going to wait for an England game to give birth!

Baby Instructions

To help me not make some common mistakes I was helpfully given this picture guide.

I’ve been running Coding Dojos for the Tech community in Glasgow for a while now. A Coding Dojo is a 2 hour coding session where programmers of varied skill levels come together to work on a common task. The task is simple in scope and difficulty. The goal is to learn, teach and improve with fellow software developers in a non-competitive setting.

I was approached by Adrian Mowatt and Rob Lally from AgileScotland about the prospect of getting involved with a whole day coding event in Glasgow. I eagerly joined these two pioneers and we are happy to announce the first Coding Retreat in the UK.

We will be getting 20 keen software developers together in a room, putting them in pairs and seeing what they can achieve in 40 minutes. Every 40 minutes the pairs change and we start again.

We have selected the Ruby programming language to be used by pairs on the day.

It’s happening on Saturday the 21st November 2009 at Glasgow Caledonian University from 9am to 5pm. Tickets are completely free and available from EventBrite.

We’ll be providing breakfast and lunch as well as drinks throughout the day. After 5pm we full intend to retire to a nearby watering hole.

We are limited to 20 people. So please sign up quickly as we won’t be able to increase the amount of tickets!

One killer feature on the Mac that I desperately craved on Windows was the Spotlight feature. If you press Apple+Space it gives you an option to type some text. This text is then used to search through all the applications and files you have. It searches your email, music, dictionaries, basically everything on your machine. I use it as the primary way of opening applications and files on my MacBook.

I still use a Windows XP machine at my work, which means I have to manually search through the Start Menu for whatever application I need. You can use the quick launch bar but that tends to get filled up fairly… well… quickly. Launchy solves this problem.

Launchy starts up when you log into Windows and offers you an on-demand dialog from a key combination. This dialog allows you to launch any application on you machine.

You simply hit Windows+Space (default is Alt+Space) to see a dialog, type ‘f’. and press return to load Firefox.

It remembers your previous choices and quickly becomes optimised for the way you think.

Windows Vista has a similar feature but it only works on whole words, which makes it pretty unusable. Luckily Launchy works on XP, Vista and Linux.

If you work in a job which requires you to use the Start Menu to launch applications, you can become much more productive (and happy) by using Launchy.

Other tools you need to use

• Twitter
• Delicious
• Google Reader

My tech blog is 2 months old today. Interestingly, the biggest referrer to the site is Twitter, rather than Google. I’m quite happy with the articles I’ve put up so far and Google is starting to index some terms on the site quite highly.

Tech Blog posts roundup

• Article: The Coding Dojo
• Article: Continuous Integration
• Tip: Using Ruby to parse an Excel document
• Tip: Automatically adding jars to the Java classpath
• Tip: Using Ruby as an AWK replacement

Coding Dojo Talk at Techmeetup

I spoke at a Glasgow Techmeetup recently about Coding Dojos. It’s something I found very easy to talk about as I’ve been running one for over a year within JPMorgan. I’ve volunteered to host one for the .NET crowd in Scotland too.

The audience was different from usual as we had another presenter from the Channel 4 investment fund. So half the crowd was there to ask why he kept rejecting their ideas.

I think my talk went quite well as there were a lot of questions at the end. One bit of feedback I received was that I shouldn’t use my hands in a velociraptor style as it scares the crowd. I’ll look out for that in the future.

Here is the video of the talk.

Joe Wright talks about Coding Dojos from TechMeetup on Vimeo.

I’ve been running this blog for quite a while now and I know that the readers are either people who known me personally or professionally. I’ve often been tempted to post very technical posts on this site but I’ve resisted as I know it wouldn’t fit in well.

To get around this, and encourage me to blog further, I’ve created a new site Joejag Tech which will allow me to talk about unixy, ruby goodness without confusing my parents.

I’ll mainly be posting short articles on how to solve specific problems. Occasionally I might go over a code kata in detail as well.