Walking into Neal’s Yard at lunchtime. Thinner hair and shorter than TV suggests but genuinely possessing that beautiful, melodic, broadcast voice. In many ways looked more like a nervous office worker. Here for the Coraline opening according to Twitter.
Category Archives: London
Jarvis, Upper Street
C’mon there’s only one Jarvis! It’s Jarvis Cocker with huge, ragged hair, razor sharp jawline and a general air of being the most expensive tramp in the village. And to think that he lives in France now…
London Scala User Group Meeting
Had a good meeting (I thought anyway) at the TW offices that featured a talk from Jamie Webb introducing Scala and then a quick dojo. Scala has a much terser syntax than Java but I managed to do my classic thing of mixing my languages and putting my constructs in the wrong place. The other thing that doing rather discussing taught me is that Scala’s constructor syntax is much better defined than Java with the default constructor going into the declaration of the class. That’s the kind of improvement on Java that I really like in Java. It seems to distill all these lessons you’ve been learning if you write good Java code.
The pub after the event also saw a lot of discussion, there was quite a bit of discussion about testing and dynamic versus static typing. Personally I have decided to follow Neal Ford and reject the issue. To me both Ruby and Scala are low ceremony, high essence languages that choose different approaches to address the same issue. As such I don’t think there is any contradiction in liking and wanting to learn both languages.
Similarly I love compile time checking but I’m not giving up on testing. It’s a synergistic practice and I want to get the benefits from TDD/BDD/Tests as Specification. To me there is some irony that if I do have a test suite then actually I have more flexibility about my choice of languages. Not testing means you get much higher value from strong compile checking and therefore something like Scala is going to deliver much more benefit quickly. At the end of the day though I don’t want to have treat my tests as the gamekeeper of my wild code. I do expect the language and the compiler to give some structure and help to the development process.
Despite (because of?) my mistakes want to do some more and I think Aaron (the founder of the group) suggested converting an existing Java program to Scala. That seems pretty sensible and I have an old Java program that I use a lot hanging around that needs some TLC.
If you are interested in Scala and in London I would recommend coming along to this meetings because you have the chance to meet and talk to everyone who is really engaged in Scala in the city. And to the guy who came all the way from Belgium; I salute you, you are a real hero!
John Rocha, Mayfair
John Rocha, locking up his office. Awesome! I thought the John Rocha offices were just where they did office admin but there’s Rocha himself, smoking a cigarillo and chatting to a Bubble apparel-like employee, locking the goddamn office by himself.
Does he open up and take in the milk I wonder?
Richard Ayoade, ICA
In the bar prior to the Gravenhurst gig, still cool. Sending a woman to the bar for the drinks. Respect.
Spotted outside of Islington for once; counts.
Geek Nights are go!
So it’s taken a lot of work but finally we have Geek Nights! Yeah!
The events are effectively sponsered by ThoughtWorks as they are provided the food, drink and venue (the ThoughtWorks London office). The first one is going to be on mocking and Steve Freeman and Nat Pryce of JMock are going to give a talk.
The Geek Nights are open to anyone who is interested in the topic, you can sign up via the link on the Wiki.
Chris O’Dowd, Soho
Outside the Toucan bar, drinking Guiness and having a few fags, trying to nail his Irishman stereotype I guess. Tall and somewhat goofy, battering on about projects and what people are doing.
Trying to avoid shouting his catchphrase at him is torture.
Simon Amstell, Soho
Older in real life but still looking and talking like the quintessential posh sixth-former.
Dean Lennox Kelly, Soho
Born in the same year as I. Expensive rough. Chatting on a cell phone and spinning around to break eye contact at the intersection.
Lenny Henry, Soho Square
Tall, square, in a suit so sharp you could slit your wrists on it. Talking about doubt and walking north.
