Skip to main content

Professional Membership

I have just applied for professional membership from the BCS (British Computer Society). They are a professional body that looks over the UK IT industry. They have quite a few members (approx 65,000). Although there are other IT professional bodies (IAP and IMIS for example), I feel that the BCS represents IT a little better.

I have been a student member for some time and although I haven't really got the most out of it as of yet. I think the biggest problem with this sort of thing is that there are so many people in IT against it. It's a rather strange industry in that sense. Other industries have well established professional bodies and have chartered levels that people try to attain. For example accountants always strive to become chartered. I think perhaps some people in IT don't want to be regulated because they don't want their unprofessional conduct revealed.

People seem to automatically think of these organisations as out to get you or out to steal your money or holding some secret meetings about mass cover ups. In reality the BCS is what people make of it. It is just a collection of professionals in the IT industry that are trying to help legislate and develop IT. The legislation side is both concerned with protecting people from fraudsters in IT and from unfair practices in IT (every has known at least one crazy IT person that has abused their powers) and also to help protect the industry (from things such as outsourcing). I in no way speak for them so these are just my ideas.

I have been to a couple of BCS meetings as I mentioned and found them to be interesting to a degree. However not enough people of my ilk attend. This is my only gripe with meetings of this type, you tend to get a lot of business facing fools talking at each other in some hope of generating business for themselves or just patting each other on the back. I think one point to make is that the BCS meetings don't really discuss relevant topics in a fast paced technologist way. As an example I went to one meeting regarding Second Life and how it could be used in business. The presentation was a little empty with no real meat in the content and by that time second life had just become a joke. If you want to do the social media thing check out the twitters, the facebooks the blogs and things like that. That said it's up to the members to direct what the meetings are about. It may be worth keeping an eye out for any interesting lectures they may hold. The one I go to is the Nottingham and Derby Branch which is in Long Eaton, Nottinghamshire.

On the subject of meetings, last week I went to a good meeting called Nott Tuesday which is held in the centre of Nottingham on a monthly basis. It is hosted by a company called Essendex (which my girlfriend works for actualy). The subject was Agile programming and so I found it really interesting, they talked about much of the things I am currently reading about in a book about extreme programming at the moment. Met some new people and had a few drinks. It completely contrasted with the meetings at the BCS in that I felt the people realy knew what they were on about and were talking about current topics. I don't know whether I learnt anything but talking about these subjects keeps it in the forefront of your mind which is where it should be!

Another set of meetings (held on a Thursday monthly) is the Axis Centre meetings, which are held through the Axis training centre in Nottingham. I am yet to attend one of these but have the feeling they may be good. The next one is next Thursday. I'll let you know how it goes if I can make it.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Making your domain less mutable

This happens regularly to me (and from my anecdotal investigation everyone involved in large / old projects). We need a new piece of functionality. I write it, it's beautiful and I win the internet. I have estimated 8 days (or 22.23 lol-points depending on how you live) and it's only taken 4 days. Ah, but then a very small; mostly ignored and very unimportant detail rears it's cruel head. You need to make it work with the code that exists already. This is normally in the form of saving to some pre-existing entities. Oh dear. You save everything through the various management / service classes that exist already and nothing works. So begins the next couple of days of horror. You find that you didn't set the work = true . Most of my woes in this area are caused by modifications at layer further down (or the stored procedure it finally ends up in) changing the object that I was trying to save or not saving part of the object because of some rule. So many errors
Post a Comment
Read more

Make your objects immutable by default

More about the Good Dojo In my post last week , I discussed creating objects that are instantiated safely. Please go back and read if you are interested. At the end of the post, I mentioned that I'd also written the class so it was immutable when instantiated. This is important!!! I feel like a broken record in repeating this but I am sure at the time of writing your code, you aren't modifying your object all over the place and so are safe in the belief that protecting against mutability is overkill. Please remember though, your code could be around for a hell of a long time. You aren't writing your code for now... you are writing for the next fool that comes along (including you) . Nothing is more upsetting that coming back to fix a bug on some wonderfully crafted code to say "Who has butchered my code?!", but often you were involved at the start of the process. You made the code easy to modify, allowing objects to be used / reused / modified without thi
Post a Comment
Read more

IIS Administration using Microsoft.Web.Administration using F#

A friend had mentioned his joy at using Powershell. I guess this is pretty cool and I don't mind Powershell. I sort of missed the boat a little with it because I haven't done any Windows Administration since I used to look after Windows Server 2000 machines (and possibly a couple of 2003). At that time I had a different arsenal to cause untold woe on my fellow colleagues....VBSCRIPT!!!! Boy could I cause trouble with that. With a combination of that, VBA and SQL I used to love creating spider webs of pure madness, once written the apps were tied together so precariously; one false move and the entire thing would explode.... anyway that's a different story. Back to the Powershell. He was using it to automate IIS (or else I heard what I wanted to so I could try and push F# onto him, who knows?). I have heard various stories of extremely large platform automation scripts being written recently (for example  .net rocks interview with Steve Evans ) and whilst they seem to be g
Post a Comment
Read more