The random utterances of David Arno

PowerPoint – and its OSX and OpenOffice equivalents – are a fact of life when it comes to presentations, as slides are very useful to both the presenter and audience. However if like me, you like to attend programming language-orientated presentations, PowerPoint can be a complete nuisance. In order to demonstrate code in an IDE, and present using a set of slides, the presenter must switch their screen back and forth between the IDE and PowerPoint. This is rarely a pleasant experience. However there is a rather neat alternative, which I have recently used, that avoids this. Read more

ActionScript 3 (AS3) is a statically typed language with support for dynamic types. On the whole this flexibility neatly handles most development requirements in a sensible and reliable way. However its implicit conversion rules would benefit from being completely overhauled. Read more

 
Event-driven architecture
The first talk of the day, by Stefan Norberg, was frustrating for me as it really brought home how much we constantly re-invent the wheel with software. Read more

I had been somewhat apprehensive of the first day of this year’s QCon London as the schedule didn’t really excite me. The “Architectures You’ve Always Wondered About”, “Non-Relational DBs & Web Oriented Data ” and “Solution” tracks aren’t really my thing and the “Dev and Ops: A single team” and “Software Craftsmanship” tracks sounded like jargon-laden fluff tracks that were likely to be full of hot air and waffle, rather than substance. That left just the “Functional Programming” (FP) track. Whilst I’m happy to learn about FP, I didn’t want to spend my whole day on the one track. Thankfully, my worries were baseless and the day turned out to be really very good. Read more