I need to start writing more. I used to be a prolific writer. I’m going to write these monthly posts as a means of getting me writing again. Apologies if you find them dull, however I need something to kick-start me!

November was a busy month. So busy, I had pretty much written it off within the first week of the month. Work-wise, I had a handful of site visits to make to the east of Glasgow. Couple that with a couple of trips out to getting the car serviced and its suspension repaired (Edinburgh’s roads are in a dire state of disrepair), it rather felt like a month where I never actually stopped.

12th through to 16th
We managed a short break at Centre Parcs in the north of England. I say break, I really mean three days (Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday) – the Monday and Friday are typically spent loading/unloading the car and driving to/from the resort. Loading and unloading the car, especially with the roofbox, is quite frankly, a chore and not something I would class as a holiday activity.

On the plus side, I did manage to try a couple of things: a Segway and tree-trekking. The latter I had done before some 20 years ago. The Segway was new and was rather cool; sadly not road legal!

17th – DunDDD
I don’t often get to sit through a whole session end-to-end, however I managed it for a number of sessions at DunDDD. I pleased to be able to sit through these sessions: Steven Clarke’s “How do you combine user experience and developer tools?”, Gary Short’s “Marginal Gains – Bringing UK Cycling Success to Your Dev. Team”, Seb Rose’s “Bad Test, Good Test” and Gary Short’s “Not Everything is an object”.

29th and 30th – Bletchley Park
Towards the end of the month, the Microsoft MVP Open Day took place at Bletchley Park near Milton Keynes. I drove down, via Newcastle and Sunderland, picking up Jon Noble and Andy Westgarth on the way. It was an early start on the Thursday, I left Fife at 0500 on the Thursday. Despite that, it took me a good three and a bit hours to get to Cullercoats near Newcastle. After a short stop in Sunderland to top up the travel mug, we headed south and made it to Milton Keynes in the nick of time.

These two days were definitely a highlight for me. Apart from the uber-ness of being at Bletchley Park and the National Museum of Computing, I was also able to catch a couple of MVP-led sessions. Liam Westley ran his Commercial Software Development session and Guy Smith-Ferrier ran his session about Riting Roslyn Refactorings: Harnessing The Compiler As A Service. Again, it’s not often I get to sit in on sessions end-to-end, so this was the second time this month that I’d managed it! We, the DDD team, ran a short session on DDD, the community and user group involvement.

Historic site of secret British codebreaking activities during WWII and birthplace of the modern computer.

Full of legacy treasures!

I wrote some BBC BASIC, haven’t lost it yet!