Category: Community

Posted on

Tremendous Tech in Trondheim

Trondheim is tiny – at least to someone who lives in the shadow of London. So it was eye-opening for me, over four short days, to immerse myself in the fully formed tech scene of a region with a population 2% of that of London’s.

Ocean Space Research at Marintek

Ocean Space – I’d never heard the term before so it took me a moment to understand, that as opposed to outer space, this refers to the vast unexplored regions below the sea-line which we know less about than the surface of the moon. This is the heart of what Marintek do, and they were the hosts for the science working group meeting I was there for, but more about that later. The work done at Marintek is fascinating, but I will limit it to my 3 highlights:

  • Ocean labs and  towing tanks are used for simulating conditions at sea, for example, oil rigs in the ocean. Yes the tanks are bigger than swimming pools. Yes they could generate all sorts of waves. No we couldn’t swim in them (or take selfies for that matter).
  • Floating wind turbines –  I heard about them first here – harnessing wind power in the deep sea, amazing!
  • Cavitation tunnels – first the science lesson: air bubbles under pressure actually boil at low temperatures, causing implosions aka cavitation – how great is that? So great, I’m linking to this video again so you don’t miss it.   Well, actually it’s not so great for badly designed propellers. Luckily this can all be tested for in a cavitation tunnel.

The icing on the cake for the visit was hearing about the plans for a bigger and better ocean space centre,  opening in 2020 (assuming the politics all works out as planned). Who knows what else the great depths have to offer mankind?

Continue reading “Tremendous Tech in Trondheim”

Posted on

Is Your Open Source Community Still Telling Newbies to RTFM?

Recently, I was shocked to see a newbie being told to RTFM in a forum for an open source community I have been part of for years. It seemed so ludicrous at first I thought it must be a parody.  My disbelief was akin to seeing a roof being built with asbestos “Are we seriously still doing that?”.

Ok, ok, I’ll admit in the very early part of my career, I would have condoned replying to someone in a forum in that way. After all we were busy programmers, under pressure to get things done, why should we waste our time on users who couldn’t even be bothered to try to help themselves? It was a quick way to set them straight.

Knowing this was the culture, it would take me ages crafting a question to an open source community, spelling out the manuals I’d already read and things I’d googled before asking for help. Often I wouldn’t even bother posting at all. I could easily handle being ignored, but not the subconscious fear of an RTFM. Over the years I’ve come to appreciate how really toxic such responses are for open source communities and their growth.

It was oh so arrogant and often too easily done, but I’m glad I now know better. Asking someone to RTFM is never justified and always unprofessional. I was glad to see that in this specific case, another member of the community jumped in to help the newbie and a senior member of the community put out a request to keep things civil.

Like me, the communities are growing up too. One of the best things to happen in the Eclipse community has been establishing a code of conduct, not just for conferences but for daily dealings of the community. Yes, as I found out, it turns out we really do need one after all – laid out in writing for all to share as the common culture. The best bit? Now if you see someone exhibit this behaviour, you can take them quietly aside and ask them to Read The, erm, Manual.

Posted on

We’re A PyDev Gold Sponsor

Kichwa Coders are proud to be a gold sponsor of Pydev. For us this is a continuation of the support we pledged last year.  This year has also seen Kichwa Coders join the Eclipse Science Working Group and become part of the global collaboration working towards reusable open source software. Python has always played a major part in scientific software and will continue to do so going forward. PyDev is the best Python development environment out there, we love it and our clients and their customers love it.  We’re excited about the plans ahead, particularly the Python profiler.  Here’s where you can learn more about the new features planned and join us in supporting PyDev.

Posted on

What Good Tech Events Look Like

KidsAdoreDitchMy 5-year old son and I walked into the Village hall at Shoreditch, not sure what to expect after making the trek into London following a spur-of-the-moment sign up to Kids Adore Ditch. We needn’t have worried, because from our initial warm welcome it was a terrific day-out. And it had me thinking about how I wish all the tech conferences I go to were that much fun. Here’s what it takes:

1. A diverse crowd

The first thing that struck me was how nice it was to have such a mix of kids and tech side by side. The room was bursting with energy. And it wasn’t just boys, there were girls and plenty of them. At one point it seemed unreal as I was chatting with a fellow mum, discussing the pros and cons of the Eclipse IDE , with a quadcopter hovering nearby and a little girl doing snow-angels on the carpet. For me a that was a breath of fresh air from the normal male-dominated crowd at the conferences I normally frequent (added bonus: for once I was taller than half the people there). Continue reading “What Good Tech Events Look Like”

Posted on

Crowdfunding PyDev

Kichwa Coders is now a silver sponsor for the PyDev project.

We’ve been using PyDev since 2008, and it is truly the best Python development environment out there. With such superb features like its context-sensitive code completion, rich debugging and testing integration it is a tool that has helped us focus on the real programming problems at hand. The development effort, led by Fabio Zadrozny, is highly responsive and always forward-looking.

We are dedicated to supporting such excellence in open-source projects for our and the benefit of the whole developer community.

We look forward to the continued development of PyDev, backed by the Python community. We are also excited by the new features and the LiClipse project.

Join us to support this worthwhile cause at indiegogo.
Read more about PyDev and Fabio’s blog where he explains more about the history and motivation for crowdfunding.