Hello internet, remember me from 7 months ago? What’s that, you ask? Yes, I’m still alive but it’s taken me until now to recover from a veritable barrage of poor excuses as to why I should stop spending time writing Stuff. There’s another 2 or 3 interesting recipes on their way soon, but what better way to resume from hiatus but with a rambling piece of vanity editorial opinion.

Last autumn was taken over by the idea that I had time to do two evening classes in a single term. It turns out that I could, but that it didn’t leave much time to write home about it afterwards. The dinner party cooking class was as good as ever, but the real wake up call was doing Stanford University’s Introduction to Artificial Intelligence class. I’ve never had much of a computer science background and yet I’ve made a career out of bending computers to my will, so this was wonderful opportunity to find out if I could still learn university level stuff after 12 years. The answer was yes I could, but it helped that I was properly interested in learning it and it was taught by two experts both in their subject matter and in teaching it to people. Whilst I am proud of getting an “84%” for my efforts, there were enough other people in the class of dozens of thousands who were distraught at the idea of not getting 100%, so that was a different idea of ‘normal’ I hadn’t met before. I could write pages and pages about my experiences, and perhaps I will, but this isn’t yet the time.

What has really rekindled my energy and focus was a game changing conference I attended in London last weekend, PHP UK 2012. I’ve been to a few techy conferences before, organised by The IET, vendors, or by the community of customers they serve. Scotch on the Rocks has been, and will probably continue to be my primary conference simply because it’s based on the language I’m most practiced in, but CFML will never have the same sized audience as PHP.

The London PHP user group has retained enough critical mass to host an increasingly awesome conference for 7 years now, attracting some top tier speakers and a good sized audience, but not so big that you can’t move or get close to the speakers or exhibitors. Who do I call a top tier speaker? You’ve probably come across names like eBay, the BBC, WordPress.com, Etsy.com and Rasmus Lerdorf, but there were some excellent talks from engineers closer to those I would consider my peers. I took home nearly as many points on presentation skills as I did technical ideas. I was able to speak with a few of speakers and many had spent weeks of their spare time preparing, practicing and refining their 40 minute presentations for this event, which is an inspiring amount of effort.

I realise that we were in the capital city, but I was surprised by how many people wrote on their delegate badges, or on their presentation slides “we’re hiring”. Some people even trolled the twitterfall (more on that in another post) to say things like ‘I’m hiring, DM me’. Thinking about it, it’s a great way to meet like minded people who might want to help you do whatever it is you’re trying to do, but I hadn’t encountered it before.

One of the more interesting debates was on release controls. How often should one release code and how easy should it be to release code? I’ve always been lucky enough to think that you should trust your developers, that you should have a team who’s not afraid to learn, and that you learn most quickly when you’re fixing a bug that you’ve just deployed to your application

Did you take more than 10 seconds to revert the change once you realised something was wrong? Did anybody die? Did your company lose a significant amount of trust, goodwill or money? If the answer to all of the above was ‘no’, then no harm was done and aforementioned developer has just learned some very valuable lessons and won’t be doing that again in a hurry. Clearly this approach only applies to a certain category of applications and user bases, you wouldn’t want to bork something like Amazon’s checkout system, or Google’s landing page for even a couple of seconds, but I believe that the person who best understands the implications of releasing some code is the person who’s just written it.

This approach works in practice if you force yourself to make lots of small releases, rather than fewer enormous ones, so it only really works for web-based projects. To quote Mike Williams (one of Erlang’s inventors): “Make mistakes on a small scale, not in a production project.”

I think the audience was split 50/50 between those that thought this approach was normal and why would you take the time to do it another way, and those that couldn’t believe somebody could even contemplate such a thing and how could they get away with such a cowboy attitude, but it can’t be all that terrible with services like Flickr and WordPress doing it. Some people call this continuous deployment, for me this falls into the mantra of ‘minimum necessary to get the job done well’.

From a personal point of view, the biggest ‘whoa’ moment came out of a panel discussion on scalability. Like most of the panel members, I think scalability is a function of systems architecture and how inspired your engineers are, not the programming language you use (assuming one’s code isn’t crap of course), so the conversation was widely applicable. It was a very good discussion and well worth the time to re-watch.

I’ll have to wait for the videos to be edited and published to check the exact words, but one question was about fixing technical problems when a bug only manifests for 1/4% of your 10^7 hits. Hugh E Williams from eBay said that if you hired engineers who were good at learning then they’d figure out almost anything, but it helped to be able to wheel out ‘that one guy’ who had that rare blend of curiosity, enthusiasm and doggedness who’s highly skilled in system operations and software engineering who could meditate on the problem (Amiga style) for a week and then fix it. Rasmus weighed in with a comment along the lines of ‘hire him. just hire him’.

A few people in the audience weren’t certain what they meant, isn’t this a really big single point of failure and anyway the split between programming and sysops exists for a reason. I think halfway through the explanation, Rasmus said something like ‘yep, we get it’. I don’t know whether it’s the weight of culture or if devops has taken sufficient root in The Valley for this to be normal, but whatever the understanding, it was like they’d just described me and what I do in just a few words. Whoa.

So there we have it, community conferences make you feel more connected with other people doing what you do. Who knew?

Spring has finally sprung and I’ve taken advantage of having a well deserved Weekend Off to get caught up in the garden.

It’s not all good news unfortunately, a number of my woody bush fruits were more dead than I’d hoped, including last year’s fun guavas. Apparently they’re not hardy to -Yorkshire after all, neither was the rose nor the goji berry. The Honeyberry coped ok, and the currants and gooseberries are roaring back into growth.

Gooseberries Before

I took the time to give the Gooseberries their bi annual prune, clearing out the mass of growth and restoring their goblet shape a little. I’ve put the prunings into some gritty compost in the hope that they will strike and I’ll have even more bushes. I tried that last year with one of my red currants and whilst only one of those cuttings rooted, that’s growing on nicely.

Gooseberries after their prune

I’ve done quite well for a breadth of varieties of Stuff this year. A friend at work generously gave me a pile of accidentally chitted Jerusalem Artichokes, so I’m hoping they do better than this time last year. The roots are in season at the moment, which is suitably tasty.

I had a really good seed trading session with another friend yesterday, who introduced me to the Real Seed Company who seem to be a good halfway house between Chase Organics and the HDRA’s Heritage library service.

The beds have been dug over and raked and are warming up nicely in the sun, so I’ve direct sown a few rows of Spinach, Chard, Beetroot, Strawberry Spinach (it didn’t germinate last time I tried it but hey, optimism!), French, Runner and Borlotti Beans, Mangetout Peas, and Unwin’s Rainbow Mix of Carrots that I got for Christmas.

My usual potato buckets have been potatoed, I’m going for a lazy earthing up approach by half filling them now and I’ll finish filling the up in a couple of months time. It worked last year.

I didn’t get on with Spinach Tarpy last year, I didn’t like its leaves as much as a traditional breed and it bolted too easily, so I’ve gone for Thompson and Morgan’s Heritage Bloomsdale this year.

I’ve pinned this year’s tomato hopes on an RHS stamped bushy variety called Vilma, another dwarf early, which I’ve paired up with another super early bush variety called Latah, I really associate with its description “The plants are quite untidy. To be honest, you can’t really train them or support them in any way – but if you let them get on with it they really will make ripe tasty tomatoes earlier than you thought possible”.

I’ve sown a few flowers as well, including my fourth generation of Morning Glorys, I’m not exactly following a breeding programme, more that they’re dead easy to grow from seed that you’ve saved yourself. I’ve also got a few clumps of Alyssum and some third generation Marigolds.

A couple of pots of Coriander and Basil from Suffolk Herbs of Kelevedon, Essex for the Kitchen Window Sill have completed the collection.

With up to a foot of snow in places, it’s been an interesting few days to see just how prepared we were for carrying on with life in the snow. Some things were succesful, others not so much. As ever, one of the biggest risks with driving in the snow is all the other people, it doesn’t matter if I’m anchored to the road if somebody else comes round the corner sideways. I suspect I would be less optimistic if my daily commute wasn’t so lucky.

1) Winter Tyres. Oh my god do these make a difference. I left it until well past the last minute (well, ok, Monday morning) to get some and was lucky enough to get the last two Michelin Alpins from Ian Brown Tyres. I would have preferred something less eye wateringly expensive, but they’ve probably paid for themselves already and they had darned well better last many years worth of winters. These are not magic, but they give you a fighting chance when the temperature is below 7 degrees C or it’s very wet and snowy, some (presumably quite rich) people use them all year round. My car has been a complete liability in previous winters, with the brakes freezing on, the front wheels not being able to grip on the snow on flat carparks and generally been more hassle than just walking. In contrast, this week’s been almost completely uneventful, with the front wheels able to accelerate, turn and brake adequately on a surface that it otherwise wouldn’t have even been able to move on. Driving along our tiny lane and along country roads has been with caution rather than abject panic. The back wheels are just as crap as ever though, so don’t be too surprised by the conservation of momentum when going round corners…

2) Remember chemistry. This is one of today’s lessons that I wish I’d thought of. If you can’t quite get enough grip on ice to reverse out of the snow drift you’ve just gently slid into, then melt it by pouring out your spray bottle of windscreen deicer. This melts the ice a treat and lets you use your sturdy plastic scraper to dig down to the road. It turns out that concentrated screenwash with antifreeze does not work. Chemistry may apply, no purchase necessary, your mileage may vary.

3) Gently does it. Unless you’re practicing your 15mph powerslides in a deserted car park, try to remember momentum. Give yourself bags of time for your car to respond to each command you give it, otherwise you may not accelerate, slow down or turn in time to follow the road or the car in front. Patience also applies. If necessary, carry a spare Little Book Of Calm to chew upon. You’ll get there in the end.

4) Try to be prepared. Make sure your portable sources of energy are as full as possible, be that refined dead dinosaurs in the car’s tank, or mobile phone batteries being full, not half full, or a packet of biscuits in the glovebox. That way, you’re able to call for help and then calmly eat a tasty snack whilst awaiting the cavalry. Pack a 2 ton tow rope and know where your car’s towing points are, it’ll have them front and rear.

I’d best finish with a disclaimer, these are just our thoughts of the week and should be considered to have less credibility than any other unreviewed words you might find lying around the internet. Now go mail order some mid-range winter tyres (because the internet’s the only place with any stock left) and get your local garage to fit them.

Shiny icy lane

Pretty Trees