Symbolic Forest

One of my flaws is that as soon as I’m familiar with something, I assume it must be common knowledge. I love tutoring and mentoring people, but I’m bad at pitching exactly where their level might be, and in working out what they might not have come across before. Particularly, in my career, software development is one of those skills where beyond a certain base level nearly all your knowledge is picked up through osmosis and experience, rather than through formal training. Sometimes, when I’m reviewing my team’s code I come across things that surprise me a little. That’s where this post comes from, really: a few months back I spotted something in a review and realised it wouldn’t work.

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Keyword noise: coding, software, .NET, .NET Framework, computing, C#, development.

Only a day after the new garden blog went live, I found myself with a problem. This morning, I noticed a problem with it, on K’s PC. Moreover, it was only a problem on K’s PC. On her PC, in Firefox and in IE, the heading font was hugely oversized compared to the rest of the page. In Chrome, everything was fine.

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Keyword noise: blogging, development, fonts, web design.

Having just moved house, we’re very aware right now that in the south-west, affordable housing is hard to find. It might be getting harder, too. Yesterday’s news included an announcement that local councils will be able to block developments on garden land.

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Keyword noise: brownfield, development, garden, garden grabbing, green space, housing, planning, redevelopment, Symbolic Towers.

No, I’m not a masochist.

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Keyword noise: Basic, computing, Excel, geek, IT, language, learning, masochism, programming, software, development, VBA, Visual Basic.