Hg Init: a Mercurial tutorial by Joel Spolsky »
Great tutorial and induction to the Distributed Version Control Mercurial which includes a section dedicated to the differences between using Subversion (SVN) and Mercurial for those that are used to using a Centralised Version Control system.
Update Conference 2011 gets the thumbs up!
On Monday, I attended the Update Conference 2011 in the Brighton Dome Theatre and it was a fantastic experience it was! Great venue and a good mix of talks and entrainment with live music acts (including the host himself singing on stage to open the event and a Kinect hack sample mixer). The majority of the talks were very design driven, focusing on the user experience and interface from web and mobile technologies.
Between the various sessions, 5 min mini-talks (TechBeats) were taking place in another area focusing on smaller and more specific subjects such as Typography for the web detailing the differences when compared to choosing fonts for printed works and the mobile phone industry in Africa which was an eye opener for me (more people in Africa have access to mobile Internet then clean water).
The organisers also booked the Brighton Museum for an after party which allowed us to view the exhibits while live music acts and DJs were playing their sets.
All in all, it was definitely worth the ticket price and I look forward to Update Conference 2012.
(I will post more on some of the individual talks a bit later).
User Interface Design For Programmers »
It’s an old article but a pretty good one with analysis on GUIs from applications that we are all familiar with. Well worth a read if you ever had to implement a GUI menu or are intending to.
Automated Testing: Building A Flexible Game Solver »
Interesting article on using an AI script to ‘solve’ complete a game and be used for automated testing. I have been looking into this type of thing myself and researching if it would be possible to write one for the games I am working on at Playfish using something like Sikuli as the player.
However, for it to be useful as an automated tester, it would need to be able to pick up on crashes and where the player would be stuck and report to a server/email the developers on where and how it happened.
