Wow... it's been a year since I last wrote here.

Awkward.

I do have some excuses. This time last year I was in the middle of getting ready to get married. It's not exactly something you can do over a weekend. Unless you get married in Vegas. Maybe. Anyway, we didn't go to Vegas.

Not long after that I started job-hunting again after feeling the urge for something new. Like so many things, this expanded to fill almost all of my free time, since the application process for development roles is apparently more stressful than doing a presentation in front of thousands of people. Or maybe that's just me? Not sure. In any case, it was a big time sink.

Then we moved flat. I was offered a job in London, and commuting from Southampton was about as much fun as trimming your toenails with a hammer, so my wife … Read more

A friend and I were discussing the relative merits of LabVIEW the other day. Coming from a theoretical, software-focused background, I struggle with LabVIEW, which I think hides too many of the underlying workings of a program from the user for the sake of simplicity. My friend, on the other hand, does a lot of experimental engineering work and loves that LabVIEW frees him from the need to look at line after line of code.

This got me thinking: should engineers, particularly those working in electronics, be more prepared to work with low-level code? I mean obviously they work with it already, but my (admittedly limited) experience so far is that few engineers take the time to engineer software that is clear, testable and maintainable. In a world where both hardware and software are advancing at an exponential rate, shouldn't we be cultivating engineers who at least appreciate the need … Read more

I'm acutely aware I haven't written here for... [looks for last post] nearly six months. This is mainly due to being busy, which in turn has fostered a "sure, I'll write another blog post, when I have time" sort of mentality. I started thinking this in September and, well, here we are.

To force me to get my act together and start writing here again, I offer you this mediocre excuse for a meaningful blog post. This isn't going to be very long but is going to be a bit more wishy-washy, so if you don't care for that sort of thing, feel free to ignore the rest of this and check back here later.

So anyway, what's kept me so busy for the past few months? Well, finishing my PhD by way of writing my thesis was the main thing. The actual writing part filled up my summer entirely … Read more