I first joined Borland back in 1997. I left for a couple of years in 2000, but was tempted back in 2002, and I’ve been there ever since.
The company name has changed under me a couple of times since of course, but I’ve now spent the last 14+ years working with largely the same bunch of passionate people building tools we love, to help other software developers. There were bad days of course, like any job, but on the good days I couldn’t believe someone was paying me to do it.
VersionInsight in RAD Studio XE8 has been extended further, with deeper Git integration and also support for Mercurial (in addition to Git and Subversion). In this article I want to quickly highlight the new Git features, as that’s what I mostly use, but you can see more about the Mercurial support here.
As an aside, if you’re not familiar with VersionInsight, I did some videos quite awhile ago that showed how to use it against Subversion, and then another video which shows it working against Git.
I’m pretty strict about keeping this blog developer-related, so please forgive me this one off-topic post.
I’ve been in Tokyo this week for work, and on Monday I was walking passed a McDonald’s in Ochanomizu when I was struck by the following poster out the front.
My first reaction was one of amazement. Amazement that McDonald’s had managed to make itself even less appealing to me than it already was.
I was in Perth on Tuesday night, showing RAD Studio XE6 to a bunch of developers. Afterwards, one of them came up to me and said (edited for profanity):
“I’m on XE5 and I don’t think it’s fair that I pay the same to upgrade to XE6 as someone on XE4 or XE3. I’ve given you money more recently than they have, so I should pay less!”
Since moving my sample code from google code to github, I’ve had a few people complain that now they can’t open the source from within the IDE using VersionInsight.
This is not quite correct. Read On…
This book has taken me longer to read than just about any other technology book, but I’ll come back to that.
The premise of this book is that machine learning has become an integral part of modern applications, from Amazon’s product recommendations through Google’s pagerank and on to decision making, filtering and clustering and a few others in between. Basically a range of different approaches to extracting meaning from data. Each chapter covers a different technique from a very practical angle: you actually build an implementation of the algorithm in question. Read On…