Last night’s NSCoder Night London was the smallest gathering yet. Not surprising considering that most regulars had been to NSConference Mini the previous Friday. It was also at a new place – The George Inn on Borough High Street because the Bunch of Grapes was showing football.

After spending the evening in the Old Bar which was mostly empty we thought we’d try and have the next meeting there as well. Far more space and quiet enough to hear everybody. This could have been because people had gone elsewhere to watch the football or were sitting on the benches outside to enjoy the clement weather. The downside was that the food wasn’t as good.

So, for next month, we’ll try and have the meeting at the George Inn and see how it copes with a larger group of people, and for those who turn up early they can go to the Bunch of Grapes for food. There is no point in trying to arrange dinner afterwards because people have got trains to catch.

The usual venue will be showing world cup football on our usual night so rather than put up with the a crowded upstairs room and droning vuvuzelas it seems a better idea to shift the meeting from one week. The suggestion is The George Inn on Borough High street. It’s just a couple of minutes further on from London Bridge station.

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The other idea I had was to gather on the embankment outside the London Assembly building. But the weather reports say it might be windy.

This is just a temporary location for a week.

I’ve been a bit quiet lately, but that doesn’t mean that the schedule has changed.

Tomorrow is the third Tuesday of the month, and that means another London Mac developer get together.

See you there.

Today is the third Tuesday of the month, so it’s time for the London NSCoder Night.

The meeting is at the usual place at the usual time. There is a table booked upstairs from 7pm. Send me an email or a DM on twitter if you need my phone number or any other details.

As it’s such a nice day, I might turn up early. See you later.

Sorry for the late notice but there is an NSCoder Night London on Tuesday, January 19th at 7pm ish. at the Bunch of Grapes in Borough. Google Maps isn’t accurate, so use this map to find it. I’ve booked a table upstairs so we won’t have to hang around waiting to find a place to sit.

WiFi can be spotty in the pub, so if you want to be sure to find us drop me a message and I’ll let you have my mobile number. There is food available until 9pm if you’re likely to be hungry. Unfortunately, there is a minimum age of 21.

As usual, you don’t have to bring a laptop and code; you can just come and be social.

Finally, at one of last year’s meetings, mention was made of having a Cocoa hackday along the lines of CocoaDevHouse. If you have any ideas for this or have experience in setting up these kinds of events I’d love to talk to you about taking this further.

See you tomorrow.

On New Year’s eve, Dámasa asked me to calculate some fraction of a fraction and provide the answer as a fraction in eighths. The post had just arrived so I flipped over an envelope and started working it out.

“Why do you need the answer in eighths?” I asked.

“Because I’m trying to convert a recipe and my scales only go down to eighths of an ounce.”

“Why don’t you just use grams?”

“…”

This little episode reminded me of an article by Alex Papadimoulis where he used the analogy of being asked whether it was better to use a bottle or a shoe to pound a nail. Although there are situations where either could be used, the real answer is, of course, to use a hammer. Sometimes we are asked questions to which we can provide an answer; but perhaps we should first stop and ask the reason for the question before answering it.

Let’s take Stack Overflow as an example. The programmer’s question and answer site that is also a game. ‘Good’ behaviour, such as asking good questions, providing helpful answers, are rewarded by upvotes, ‘bad’ behaviour; lazy questions, incorrect answers, are discouraged by downvotes. It is becoming increasingly common to find a Stack Overflow link as the top hit when searching the web for answers to programming questions. But, if you follow a mailing list for your chosen speciality it isn’t hard to see the same question in both places and different approaches to answering them.

Stack Overflow’s recommended approach to help vampires is a pragmatic one. Essentially, you can either be aloof and use the tools of the site to discourage the behaviour; or you could just answer the question and get some points. On a mailing list like, say, CocoaDev, a weak question will get sharp answers (if any); but on Stack Overflow, somebody might just answer the question because they get something out of it.

This might be useful to somebody. I’m sure there are times where we all just need a quick answer to question without deeper knowledge. Get help with the ‘how’ to get something done, and pick up on the ‘why’ later. But read enough questions in public forums and you’ll soon recognise those who just want to know the ‘how’, and no amount of saying they need to learn the basics is going to help. Maybe back up and ask why they are asking so you can better answer their question.

To tie this back to fractions, have a look at this Republic of Math post about the difference between relational and instrumental understanding in mathematics. A particular example is how the invert and multiply method of fractional division is widely taught without actually developing an understanding of the operation itself. When I was 14 my elder brother taught me differentiation. Not by saying “subtract one from the exponent and multiply”, but rather by drawing a curve and working through calculating a tangent using deltas and differences tending to zero and how it led to the simpler method. I’ve long forgotten the hard way, but after that I was very good at calculus.

Perhaps this is something to think about next time you see somebody ask how to write an application without using Interface Builder.

The London chapter of NSCoder night closed the year in style. More developers than ever attended travelling in to London from as far as Brighton, Cambridge, Reading and Colchester. A very crowded and noisy pub meant that it was more of a social occasion with laptops being brought out only now and again. The picture was taken early on so it doesn’t look that croweded, but we ended up taking over the whole corner. The numbers were also swelled by combining it with the London CocoaHeads group this month.

Thank you to everyone for coming out and making these monthly gatherings a success. We’ll start again in January, just as the wind up to NSConference starts. Keep an eye on the feed and the calendar for up to date information.

Seasons greetings to you all!

For those who haven’t noticed, the next meeting is on Tuesday, December 15, 2009 at 7pm ish. at the Bunch of Grapes pub in Borough. We’re usually upstairs and are easy to spot. If you still want to be sure, drop me a line and I’ll send you my mobile number. WiFi can be spotty at the pub so calling me if you’re lost is probably better than resorting to the great communication medium of our time that is twitter

There may be some books brought along so people can look through them if they are considering buying them.: Coders At Work, Cocoa Design Patterns, Core Data, Xcode3 book, Head First Design Patterns, Head First Javascript. Please let me know if your interested in any of these; I don’t mind bringing them along, but not just for the sake of it. Particularly the Head First books, which have a unique approach which looks strange to a lot of people, so they are worth a look.