A few good things about strings in .net 7

Back in 2003, when the web was young (and so was I), Joel Spolsky, co-creator of StackOverflow declared this: “So I have an announcement to make: if you are a programmer working in 2003 and you don’t know the basics of characters, character sets, encodings, and Unicode, and I catch you, I’m going to punish […]

“…my brother is totally interested in becoming a game developer”

How do people learn things these days? I saw this great question on Facebook, and dropped a really quick simply reply to get the OP moving: For people who know me, they’d recognize that as standard draft from me, a version of “let me Google that for you”. I hope the text of it helps […]

In the forest, the poui falls different

I leaned on a tree after my seventh rope, it felt like. I was good and proper bun.Then the neighbourhood watch appeared. A beetle here, some ants that clearly grew up on cassava and two wasps. I had to get up.I put my hand on a tree to stabilize and a member of the bush […]

Less wizardry, more automation

“I want to book an appointment with to renew my license in Arima at your nearest available date in the morning” I wonder if I can make a chatbot that does this? It’s a reworking of this, https://licensingappointment.mowt.gov.tt/ #TODO

Agents of TEAMS

Hey! Last week I presented at DevFest Caribbean. It was a Google Developer Group event, where the GDG of multiple regions came together, it involved the groups from Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, Jamaica and others. There were some really good presentations, and you can check them out here. My presentation focused on virtual agents I […]

A Software Engineering Course

When I saw this question, my first response was similar to quite a few others on the thread. “Teach a combination of these things: CI/CD; Source Control; DevOps; Observability and Telemetry; UX…”. But I didn’t post it, because I had an inkling that something more was needed. That a three-month course to even masters-level students […]

status.[utility].co.tt

Recently, there was thunder and lightning and heavy rainfall in Trinidad. Trees fell, and there was a range of property damage. In cases like this, the aftermath can involve service outages across a number of service providers. For me, it was power. There was a bright spark, a loud bang and then silence. Right after […]

Caribbean Developers’ Salary Survey – Redux

A developer survey I ran on Caribbean Developers came up recently, so I wanted to share what I learnt.

Nurse Carter – a COVID19 hackathon winner

Nurse Carter in 2020.

That time when global quarantine liberated digital services. #CoronaEffect

There has been a sudden, dramatic step-wise improvement in digital services in Trinidad & Tobago. You can place an order via WhatsApp for groceries in Trinidad & Tobago now. From one of the largest chains in the country. Many government agencies are available in a real-time way on social media. Providing updates of a COVID […]