Contrary to popular belief...

Well it's been over a month since my last post so I thought I'd better just put up a quick note to say that I am still here and that I haven't forgotten the blog. Unfortunately lately my better half decided that maybe we should spend some time doing the gardening so instead of investigating version control systems, playing with Mono and Python and attempting to master (or at least comprehend) C++ I've been having my arms gauged open by plants which have decided that they're not going without a fight!

I have had a brief amount of time to have a look at Bazaar and will hopefully be able to put something up about that soon, it's looking good so far and is making me wonder why we're still using cvs at work. I've also had a quick look at developing apps for the Android mobile platform seeing as I now have an Android phone, I stopped when it looked like I was going to have to invest some time with Java as I didn't want to get carried away with another language, however since then I've discovered something called ASE, the Android Scripting Environment which looks as though it allows you to write apps for Android in Python - something which is of real interest to me - so I may have to spend some time looking into that.

Anyway, keep watching for more posts shortly (honest)

Bugger!

I never realised the finished formatting for a simple bit of HTML would look so bad in Blogger! I'll try and do something about that when I publish the full code tomorrow and in future posts.

What's it all about

It's probably best to explain a little about myself before I try to explain what this blog is about.

I'm a developer living in Derbyshire, I've been using Linux for about 8 years now and I've been using it as my only OS at home for about 1 year. I spend 5 days a week churning out code at work using a Microsoft stack, so .Net and C# pre-dominantly, and I've been doing this along with using some other proprietary stuff for the last 9 years.

Now I'm one of these people who feels lucky doing the job I do because I love to code. I enjoy finding solutions to problems and writing the code to implement that solution, I also like helping other people out with their problems which is why I've done a few websites for people I know as well. I've been helping out in then free and open source community for a while now by helping out in forums and such but I've gotten to the point where I want to do more and this is where this blog comes in.

I have been on and off trying to pick up Python and migrate my existing skills over to Mono but I get distracted or start trying to do too much and end up never accomplishing anything so I'm setting myself a couple of goals:

1. Teach myself Python
2. Migrate my existing skill to Mono
3. Do enough of goals 1 and 2 to start contributing towards an open-source project

The purpose of this blog is for me to post up my progress and how I manage or overcome various obstacles so that I can see how I'm doing. But more importantly it is to provide some kind of account so that anyone else who finds themselves in a similar situation to myself can learn from my experiences. This is not meant to be a tutorial blog of any kind although I may well post code snippets if I've done something which I think other people may benefit from (or I'm particularly happy with myself and want to share that).

To date I've managed to get to chapter 8 in the "Dive into Python" online book and I've written a Hello World app using Mono and MonoDevelop! So I've got some way to go, but then this is all about the journey.