Fred Boyle has setup a code challenge for developers to spend the month of May developing an app using a programming language or environment they are unfamiliar with.

Having been seriously considering trying a sort of ’20% time’ at work anyway this seems like a good way to start things.

I have opted for Go, the programming language developed by Google. Although I’m not completely unfamiliar with it, I have never used it for anything practical - so it will be a good test. The plan is to also continue the Google theme and use Dart) in the web interface too.

In terms of the app, I’m aiming to put something together that could serve a useful purpose at work. Specifically an app that keeps track of version control commits across a variety of different sources. It’s an ongoing problem trying to keep up with progress on different projects and although there are a variety of tools that do something similar there isn’t really anything that fits with my workflow.

So the idea is that the app will hook up to the variety of different version controlled systems and give an up to date view of the latest activity - a dashboard basically. It’s pretty simple but hopefully it will give me a good experience with a couple of different languages.

Project is on github.

One of the problems I’ve had with blogging in the past has been getting on with whatever platform I’ve chosen. I spend a lot of time recommending different web software to people/businesses so it should be an easy task - but it’s quite difficult to self-prescribe.

So this time around I have gone for something as simple as possible, no framework (as such), no database, no fancy themes etc.

The site is built with Jekyll, a static site generator, which is powered and hosted by github. All posts are in markdown format which is written in WriteRoom, with YAML Front Matter to handle meta data.

CSS is run through LESS and HTML5 fills in the gaps.

It’s incredibly basic but fits in perfectly with my normal workflow, which generally revolves around Git or another version control system. I’m hoping the simplicity reduces some of the friction that I find with some other tools.

The whole site is available though github and all source code is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Things To Do:

• Disqus comments for posts
• Post Tagging
• Autobuild Less when pushing/Rakefile

So it’s about time I resurrected this blog. This is now the forth time of asking, it’s surprising how something seemly so simple it can be quite a difficult task at times. Having tried and abandoned most of the blogging services going, I have added more than my fair share of Internet “flotsam and jetsam”. Hopefully this won’t add to the debris.

I guess the key is consistency, so the plan is to try at least once a week. It will be a minor miracle if I can keep it updated. But I will. Probably.