software « Antonio Roberts

From February 2th6 to 27th I was in London for dev8d. It describes itself as:

Dev8D is 4 days of 100% pure software developer heaven. It will be intense. It will be exhilarating. It will make you a better programmer.

• Learn to use unfamiliar languages (such as Python, Ruby and Clojure)
• Team up with other developers and build rapid development projects for tech prizes
• Take part in lightning session discussions with industry experts
• Swap skills and ideas with other developers

It was indeed like some kind of heaven! I arrived later in the week on Friday, but I still learnt quite a lot. I spent a lot of my time in the Expert Zone and at GB’s Arduino workshops.

Think of the Expert Zone as a more relaxed Pecha Kucha or Ignite. You get 15 minutes to talk about or promote whatever you want. I gave a short presentation on hackerspaces, with particular emphasis on fizzPOP, and why you should either form one or join one.

The Arduino workshops, led by fizzPOP regular GB, were really fun.

I’ve had an Arduino ever since the Howduino event last year but I’ve never really played around with it. Being around lots of people who are in the same position really helped me to make a move in learning it. In the end I got lots of LED’s flashing and a little buzzer to play some music. A small achievement to some, but a massive leap into the world of electronics!

Being at dev8d (and at the GNOME Hackfest, which I’ll write about another time) really taught me a lot about software development. It all starts with an idea, but taking that idea and turning it into a reality I feel is best achieved in a group setting with those who can contribute ideas and skills.

Congrats to the dev8d and devCSI team for putting on a very successful event. I’ll definitely be along next year!

As mentioned in an earlier post I’ve decided to exclusively use open source software for my work. I’ve recently been messing around with Inkscape to see if it can offer similar or better ways of working.

So far I’ve found Inkscape to be quite powerful but missing some functions that I use regularly:

I would have usually hid objects using alt+3 and then reveal them later. There’s no simple shortcut for hiding objects and, unless you enter the xml editor there’s no easy way to reveal any hidden objects.
You can’t apply a brush as a stroke. You can quite easily manipulate an object to follow a path and that is quite an amazing feature. However it’d be great if there was the option for the manipulated object to then become the other objects’ stroke.
You can’t copy objects simply by dragging them and holding alt, you have to copy then paste them in place of the old object.
I want to turn the damned bounding box off! I would’ve sometimes used this but sometimes I want the object to be the only thing that’s highlighted, not the box around it.
Gradients need to be much easier to edit. The gradient editor is quite powerful and it’s awesome that you can adjust the alpha settings of the current colour, but I I’d like a more visual editor, rather than one that requires a lot of button pressing.
Usually when I create artwork I create the objects and apply lots of different layer blends (especially Overlay). Word on the street has it that previous versions of Inkscape allowed you to apply this to every object. Now you can only do it to different layers. Oh, and Inkscape doesn’t assign each new object to its own layer. humpf
The Filter Effects tool is quite awesome… well, at least it has the potential to be. It allows you to create your own filters and apply them willy-nilly. However, I can’t get Multiply, Screen, Overlay etc to work in a way I’d expect. Still, it can be really awesome at times!

I’m still going to continue using Inkscape as it has a lot of great features, especially for those willing to mess around with lots of numbers.