I hate being asked the question "What do you do for a living?" - it's a question I like to answer literally, to get to the heart of the anwer. It's not the question per se, it's the follow ups I dread. I've now realised this is as much about my answer though as it is their reaction to it.

The conversation often goes like this.

Questioner: "What do you do for a living?"
Me: "I write code".
Questioner: "Ah, right", questioner looks saddened, "And what do you do for fun?"
Me: "I write code".


At which point they get puzzled, saddened and often walk away.

This frustrates me because you wouldn't get the following conversation:

Questioner: "What do you do for a living?"
Artist: "I'm a painter"
Questioner: "Ah, right", questioner looks saddened, "And what do you do for fun?"
Artist: "I'm a painter"


At which point questioner gets puzzled, saddened and often walk away.

This irritates the life out of me because a painter (assuming they're not a painter & decorator - which might be a misconception for an artist) simply wouldn't get the second half of the converation. To me, writing code is as much an act of creation as the artists work.

By answering literally though, I miss conveying the buzz, sheer fun and delight in the work I do. I fail to convey the creative aspect of my work, and the pride which I like to take in it. How do I answer? I say I write code. What should I say? After chatting about this recently, I realised I should be saying this: I create cool code. This is as much a choice as it is anything else. It makes it clear it's creative, it's fun, along with the delight and care.

I've often sidestepped this in the past, by listening to the specific question. "Where do you work, what's your role, what does that entail". Answers to these generally revolves around replying about my employer, the fact I'm employed as a research engineer, and it involves looking how we put the archive online for all the UK, with limited resources.

These are all fine answers leading to interesting areas, and the specific project we're working towards does fascinate people. However these answers also sadden me, since they doesn't state what I do. Based on paraphrasing my new boss (great twist on what I was saying :) - I added one word :) - I've came up the better answer: I create cool code.

After thought: Ironically, this is more about answer the question they were asking, rather than being quite so precise in my answer! Every time I answered "I write code", I wasn't actually telling them anything, after all people generally don't understand what that means in practice!

Oh, and a little sideline I've got going is encouraging others who work with me to do the same. Some of the summer of code work I'm mentoring is really cool code :-)

Well, rather surprisingly, but nicely so, I've been invited to Tim O'Reilly's FOO Camp this year. I've accepted the invite, so hopefully I'll get to go and see a whole bunch of really interesting people, chat about lots of things - hopefully excite them with what we've been doing and get excited about their stuff.

In recent years people some people who have been invited one year and not the next have gotten in a huff, for no apparent reason, so I'm going to assume this is the one time I'll be asked, try to participate to the limits of my abilities and if I'm not asked back again, so be it :) If I am, it'll be a nice surprise.

Kamaelia itself is obviously coming on leaps and bounds these days, and it's nice to be able to simply knock together systems now, with a clear expectation that they can and will scale. I don't know if the latest system I've knocked together using it will be used by the person in the BBC its been created for, but it does give them some extra options, and the time spent writing it was minimal :-)

Hopefully by the time Foo Camp comes around, we'll have more fun stuff to talk about - the SoC work where people are now churning out code & systems using Kamaelia is great fun to see - things are really coming together !

So far this seems to be going pretty well. There does seem to be interest in our projects, but not unmanageable at this stage. I've been able to do other things as well, and realistically speaking it's this week that is likely to be the issue. One person seems to be particularly interested in doing one of the projects we view as pretty key, and there's even interest in some ideas that I thought would get a luke warm reaction.

It'll be interesting to see what happens over the next few days - if interested grows. Now if we can just find someone willing to work on the pygame/CSS styled surface manager, that'd be great.

Been a very interesting evening in many respects. Some links I need to follow up on as a result follow:

Some summer of code project lists that we can work forward from:

• PSF SoC list
  • Specifically some of the this list appear important. for example this.
• XWiki's project list

Shuttleworth foundation had a meeting which amongst other places had a thread of discussion resulting on edu-sig. The whole discussion there has a number of interesting implications, especially when you consider Kamaelia is a number of steps already along that path.

Beyond that though there are a number of topics being discussed on edu-sig which imply I should really subscribe, esp given that Kamaelia could align with them very well (ie be useful for those things), and I know of at least one person inside the beeb who might support it. (maybe :-)

Summer of code deadline is 1 week earlier than anticipated (lack of line break in a specific place caught me out).

lac noted on #pypy that Strakt would find Matt's whiteboard sketcher useful, and asked why we weren't making announcements on c.l.p.a. My excuse of "too busy" seems a bit lame in retrospect. The level of "wow, that'd be useful", really implies that we really should push that up the "let's release that as a standalone" bundle. It's also likely to be hit by a similar reaction by people at work, meaning it should really happen.

I mentioned that we'd really like to see rpython extended to handle generators, lac mentioned this is something that can happen at the sprint in Iceland which is May 21-28th, so I probably won't be able to go, but Matt could potentially. lac also suggested speaking to Steve Holden about it to help set the focus for the sprint - which has been described so far thus .

Why do they bother? Especially if their posts/replies won't ever show up? There's one very persistent (in the same was a bee bangs its head against the window - ie futile and stupid looking) spammer who keeps on trying to spam here. They've provided sufficient material for spam bayes to block them automatically, so that will be integrated shortly, meaning that no one will see their pointless spams.

If you're the spammer spamming and read this: GIVE UP, FIND SOMEWHERE ELSE.

This blog will be offline for a while (probably just a few days, hopefully less :-) More when it comes back!

Lass O'Gowrie Pub, 7pm, Wed 8th Feb. I don't know if this'll be the first meetup for pythonistas that's happened in Manchester, but it'll be the first one I've been to there - should be fun :-) If you've been to one in London you know pretty much what to expect - a bunch of geeks in a pub talking, well, about python and stuff they find interesting. If you've used/written/found something you think's cool and want to talk about it & show it off please do.

Likewise if there's anything you'd be interested in seeing/hearing about, say so! If you're thinking of coming please post a reply to this. Be warned that your reply won't show up straight away (blog spam), but will show up :-)

Please feel free to forward this link around!

Kamaelia (work) (site, bliki)

Cerenity (personal) (site, bliki)

Just a placemarker really of a few convenient links really. However I can put updates in here for Kamaelia & Cerenity which don't really fit those sites. Generally speaking though, this page won't get updated, unless I add new projects :-)

Seems rather obligatory to have a post labelled first post. This is the first post of this blog, which will be my general "stuff" blog. I also have the cerenity blog, which I'd like to move back to being a cerenity blog, and the Kamaelia blog is taking on a very different form, and again, more random, more personal things don't really have a place there.

This will largely be much, much more of a dumping zone than somethings are. Also it'll allow me to have a place for ramblings, musings, stuff, about things from GP2Xs through to lots of other things. Anyway, I've really been mainly setting this up today :)