Monthly Archives: January 2012

Safeguarding the future – how we should be teaching ICT in schools

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Hands up if you studied IT, ICT or IS at high school in the UK.

Keep your hand up if you found the experience rewarding, enjoyable or useful.

Finally keep your hand up if you regularly apply what you were taught in your day to day job as an IT professional.

At this point there is one guy in the entire country with his hand still raised and he’s the lucky dude who got a job programming a turtle to draw spirals on a big sheet of paper :)

IT in UK schools sucks. In fact it sucks big time. Don’t take my word for it, the UK government’s Secretary for Education says so as well. In fact he refers to the ICT curriculum as “demotivating and dull” – ouch!

I think we can all agree that the current system of just teaching the next generation how to use applications they either a) already know how to use or b) have no interest in using anyway is incredibly limiting and is definitely hurting the UK’s ability to play a larger part in the digital world. Continue reading →

Is security BitCoin’s biggest weakness?

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If you don’t know what BitCoin is read the official blurb or more of the same from Wikipedia

At the last of our recently christened “bi-monthly, beer-fuelled BitCoin argument” sessions (aka geek ups) the issue of security as a barrier to BitCoins continued viability was raised and, shockingly, was acknowledged as a valid issue by the group’s biggest BitCoin proponent.

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My techy new year’s resolutions

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A new year has started, a fresh 366 days (only 357 shopping days left till Christmas folks!) and so I want to share my techy resolutions for the coming year:

1. Get up to speed with unit testing for all platforms

I’ve been behind the curve on unit testing for a while now and I’m aware that I really need to put some time into working into my daily development cycle. I’m not talking about becoming a TDD zealot but I do understand the need for unit testing in producing consistently high quality code and this will be the year I actually get off my butt and do something about it!

2. (Re) embrace the Pomodoro Technique 

This year I plan to really embrace the Pomodoro Technique for at least 3 days out of 5. I’ve found it to be an amazing way to keep focussed and there’s really no excuse for not using it more often.

3. Get my JavaScript up to speed both on the client and the server

I’m still not entirely sold on the evented approach used by Node.js but I’m definitely planning to get my JavaScript up to a new level. Looking at what’s continuing to happen in the JS world I would be foolish to not devote significant time to a very exciting and ubiquitous technology … and whilst jQuery will do a lot good JS development will hopefully serve me in good stead.

4. Release at least one mobile app 

For Android of course but I’m definitely going to push out at least one app. Who knows – it could make me a millionaire by this time next year ;)

5. Finish some of the cool ideas I have kicking around

Like any developer I have a load of projects on the go and I really want to use 2012 to get some of them out of my brain and into the world. 

6. Contribute to at least one open source project

My open source contributions have dropped off lately and I’m hoping that I can find a project I can contribute to (suggestions welcome) … or maybe one of my ideas that can start a whole new project!

So that’s me – how about you lot? Got anything groovy planned for 2012?