Carl Gibbs – Blog

Managing my Real-life Project

Carl • 26/07/2010 • No Comment

My girlfriend and I have just moved back into our house after some extensive building and decorating. For seven weeks we’ve been living in borrowed flats and local hotels. The whole time I’ve been popping in several times a week to see what’s going on and talk to the builder, the painter, the electrician, the brick-layer, the plasterer. After a while I realised I was treating it like managing a software project because that’s all I know. Now I’m not a project manager in my day-job. I’m a software developer: a code monkey, a class designer, an application architect, a…

Simplifying Software with Udi Dahan

Carl • 23/05/2010 • No Comment

I saw Udi Dahan this week at an event at Onalytica, Udi and a small group of around 20 developers. Onalytica’s CTO acted as host and made it an interview with Udi while giving him plenty of time to talk. This interesting format was pleasantly different than the usual technical talk where the speaker picks the topic. This was more wide-ranging and covered some of his early background as well as current topics in large-scale system design. This was the first time I’d seen him speak and he was as good as everyone had said, very funny and very thought-provoking….

Freecycle with training wheels

Carl • 28/04/2010 • No Comment

We’d upgraded to a shiny new flatscreen TV and had the old fat tube just sitting around. It’s old and now looks positively ancient but it works fine so it seemed a shame to just take it to the tip. I’d been meaning to try Freecycle for a while and never had anything to offer so it was time to have a go. It was smooth and quick: find my local group on http://www.freecycle.org/, join the group on Yahoo and add a message, not even as long as a tweet. Within 3 hours I had 3 enquiries, people locally whose…

Jesse Liberty on Silverlight 4, MVVM and TDD

Carl • 17/04/2010 • 1 Comment

Saw Jesse Liberty (Microsoft Silverlight Evangelist) speaking at a joint UK Silverlight User Group/London .Net User Group event this week. The topic was “Silverlight 4, MVVM and TDD: A Brave New World”. Jesse was a very engaging speaker and not at all phased by the large audience of over 200. His jokes about “us Americans” and comments about driving in London went down well and showed he’s good at connecting with his audience as well as that he’s enjoying his trip around Ireland and the UK. MVVM is looking like a good fit for Silverlight or WPF applications. Jesse’s emphasis…

Welcome

Carl • 10/04/2010 • 1 Comment

Welcome to Carl Gibbs’ blog. Writing software for a living it was high time for me to have a presence on the Internet. I’m not promising any great insights, just a place for people to learn a little about me without actually having to walk up and ask.