Welcome To My Blog!
Hello World!
I am totally excited. Two days ago, during the off-site, I launched this humble blog. As I said there, it’s actually incredibly difficult to reach all the engineers in our department at once. What you are reading now is part of a 3-fold attempt to fix this! But it’s also just a blog really, so to the question “why should you care?”, the answer “maybe you simply shouldn’t” is fine ;-)
3 Levels of Communication
First, there is the need for important communications between us engineers. And this is what the off-site is all about. I don’t elaborate too much here on this as the off-site will be the subject of a couple of posts soon.
Second, official communications that need some sort of non-repudiation aspect to it :-) Think announcement. For this right now, the plan is to use department-wide emails. I don’t like emails but this is all I could come up with. It’s official, you can forward it to anybody in the company to share it, it’s also pragmatic. I have a couple of those that are pending. IE 8 & 9 support plans and a clarification on 3rd-party dev tools that are in-policy and ready to use within our department (e.g. GitHub, BrowserStack, etc.). I know, those two subjects are languishing but at least you know it’s still on my list!
Last but not least, casual thoughts about anything not even closely related to our job as software engineers at BSkyB. That’s what this blog is for. I hope you’ll find it entertaining and useful. But I won’t pretend too much it to be so. It is first and foremost an extension of my brain. Its name, Le Carnet, says pretty well what it is to me. It means diary or notepad in French. That way I keep the tradition within Sky Technology to have blogs with French titles1.
How does it work?
You can conveniently peek at this part of my brain and that can be useful to you. Simply to understand what I am thinking. Maybe get some inspiration from it? Better to influence me in return. How? Well, you noticed, there is no way to comment. This is because I don’t want this blog to become a barrier to face-to-face communication, my favourite mean. So to comment, you’ll be able soon to use my whiteboard (under delivery!). I’ll post about it once it is there to give you more details. I plan it not to be your average whiteboard ;-)
In the meantime, corner me at my desk (if you can!) or contact me online… But please, don’t be shy. I won’t stop myself from being controversial here. Disagreement is expected. Don’t think “if he is more senior of an engineer than me, he must be right” because that is nonsense. And really it’s a good thing among engineers, mainstream thinking is for the Marketing team2! :-)
But sometimes your influence will be so that you’ll get to author guest posts here. Don’t get surprised then if one day you hear me begging for a post from you, it’s my new way to say I like your idea. And if you have something to share and you feel that a blog post to the department would be a great way, well talk to me, that’s also the point!
How does it really work?
Oh? I see what you mean now. Glad you asked! It’s just a bunch of static files. The blog itself is generated using a tool written in Haskell. And yes I had to write code in it to get it working. I am learning it those days. Mostly because you never invited me to pair with you3. I still need my dose of programming and FP4 is my favourite way to get things done by a computer. This is the Haskell course I am doing, up for a challenge? But you know what? If FP is something you want to learn, me and Ben Fletcher have had some thoughts about that. I will purposely keep it mysterious for now but if you’re piqued, talk to us :-)
I hope to see you there soon!
That’s all for today, SkyHackers, keep it real and remember, the Emperor will show you the true nature of the Force.