I started off the year quite involved with Shoes, but over the year I’ve become less involved. This is due both to changes at home and changes at work. Coding in general at home is just impossible. I just can’t get on the computer for any length of time - even writing this tricky and involves stealing the iPod Touch from my youngest who plays Sonic the Hedgehog obsessively. I can be stepping towards the computer and get called away to sew some buttons on a cardigan, or something else equally unpredictable. I leave earlier from home and get back later from work because of moving further away. So there is just no computing time at home.

At work, in early 2010, I had a little side project going that was a Shoes app. So I managed to spend quite a bit of time (almost) legitimately tinkering with Shoes. But that wound up earlier this year, plus my job role changed and I lost a lot of “free” time. So not a lot of Shoes anymore, but Shoes is in very capable hands, far more capable than mine - I couldn’t keep up with the pace of development and have never been able to get Shoes 3 to build on OSX PPC (and that’s another thing, lagging behind on the technology front doesn’t help: Windows XP at work and OSX PPC at home).

The best I managed outside of work was two little apps: Shoeset and Shoefiti

I have still managed to do a fair bit of coding at work (the only problem of course is it’s difficult to blog about it since it’s at work). I just can’t help myself from tinkering. Considering the size of the organisation, I thought for a long time that I couldn’t be the only geek and there must be others like me that, for example, couldn’t stand Internet Explorer and would write userscripts to fix intranet applications for Chrome and Firefox, but now I’m starting to think I am a bit unique (and not necessarily in a good way; it’s not that I’m more clever, rather that I can’t just “do as I’m told” - I think it’s just a sign that ultimately I need to work for myself if I am to ever do anything truly challenging and interesting). So this year has seen…

a lot of:

quite a bit of:

  • Java (An XMPP Bot using HTMLUnit to webscrape)

and smidgens of:

  • XSLT (with some use of jQuery as a faster alternative to a pure XSLT approach to combining XML data sources)
  • Ruby (with Mechanize and Ruby-Graphviz to web-scrape - “oh for an API” is a continuing theme at work - and then draw a organisation chart)
  • HTML and CSS
  • and SQL.

Which isn’t entirely bad for someone who doesn’t work in the IT function (I have tried: they won’t have me!). Right towards the end of the year, I’ve started getting into the R Language again, since I can (and most certainly will) use it as part of my new role, over the approved and recommended apps like Minitab and Excel.