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I read an article a few years ago about a study to see if people contribute more to their pension fund if they have seen a future representation of themselves. Not surprisingly they do. I have been bouncing the idea around in my head, so I decided to look up the study. You can read it here . They used some clever software to produce a 3D model of a person's head which they then aged. The participant was then given a VR headset inside which they could see their older self. They could interact to a limited extent with themselves, so it was better than just a photo of 'you old'. The experiments were very well run, but basically the outcome was that people can relate to their older self if they see the image and pension contributions go up. I think this idea is generally fascinating, beyond pension contribution. For example encouraging people to adopt healthy lifestyles is very difficult. Often the pull of pleasure now far outweighs some notion of protecting your future s

Continuous learning is very important in IT. A break from learning new things for a couple of years can put you in the dark ages. I have always known this and done my best to keep upskilling, but a few things I have read recently have reminded me how important this is. Leading Change John Kotter's Leading Change is a book about managing big change in organisations. It gives a set of steps that should be followed based on the author's experience with change efforts in large numbers of big companies. The most surprising thing about the book is a section at the end where he says that the thing that unites very successful people is lifelong learning. Big Data O'Reilly publish a weekly Data Science newsletter . It is well worth a spin if statistics and analysis are your thing. I think that an interest in data is in every developer's interest. They published an article this week entitled Is your development team ready for Big Data? Again one of the key skills that

The Interview I was interviewing a developer for a mid level position today and he turned out to be not up to scratch. The CV looked pretty good, but when I dug in with some fundamental Java questions he was found wanting. Not an unusual occurrence, but still costly. It took 30 minutes of my time, his time and a number of other people were involved to get the process to this stage. I wondered if there might be a way to remove some of the candidate CVs from the batch before we do the costly part of interviewing. Spam or Ham Classifying CVs could be considered like the Spam/Ham problem. Apache SpamAssassin is a good example of a spam classifier. It can probably be made to classify CVs - or at least try, but it is written in C, I think and that is not my thing any more. This looks interesting, so I forked it, converted it to eclipse and started the process of making it build with Maven. First I am going to try this out with spam and ham email, then will try it for other text p

I listened to a webinar with Pivotal today and they spoke about some of the thinking behind their Cloud Foundry platform. One of the guides they use to build this is called 12 factor.net . It is a set of principles devised by the people behind the  Heroku cloud platform. I won't go into the details here, you can read the brief web page yourself, but they cover a broad range of the factors that we often don't think about when we develop large scale enterprise systems. One such concept is the avoidance of Software erosion . This is the gradual degradation of software running in a changing environment. For example as security holes in the OS are discovered your OS is eroded. A service on which you rely fails and is not restarted. If not managed continuously items like this can result in your application going out of service. The costs of getting it back may be too great to pay. A related concept is Technical debt . This is work within a system which needs to be done in orde

I decided to do this exam a few months ago. I have been a Java developer for over 10 years, so this was overdue. There are a few simple steps and quite a lot of work. First get a book I used this one  on Kindle. Kindle is the perfect format for this stuff as you can read snippets while you wait at the bus, checkout etc. Read it through cover to cover. I did not do the exercises on this pass, I was just making sure that I could understand almost everything in there. Next you should either do the end of chapter exercises, or write small programs to test your understanding. Don't start taking mock exams too early. Mock exams These are absolutely required to test your knowledge. I used these ones . I (like most of the people whom I spoke to about this) found I did not know the material as well as I thought. The huge plus for the Enthuware mock exams is that they explain in detail why you were wrong. Take your time understanding why you made the mistakes you did. Don't ru