Slab City Blues Slab City Blues

It’s August again, and as per every year so far I’ll be spending it in the city. Last year I decided August would be a meeting free month, most people are off anyhow, and in the european tradition August is the time when we expect to be free of the minutia.

This year however, my 4-6 weeks of summer will be devoted to code; getting back to my roots. While many HCI people come from Psyc, I’m firmly from CS / SE stock and my natural tendency is to solve by building.

This year I’ve 4 things I’m trying to accomplish:

- Learn the '[go](http://www.golang.org)' language. I've been interested in these niche languages for quite a while, and I want to evaluate how go compares to c and c++ while also investigating if it has a enough libraries to be useful;

- See how I feel myself about continuous integration and [test driven development](http://david.heinemeierhansson.com/2014/tdd-is-dead-long-live-testing.html), [especially in the light of some of the great and code in artisan programming deciding that it isn't the silver bullet it was once though to be](http://www.markbernstein.org/Apr14/Driven.html);

- Build 'search-gear' (thanks to the excellent '[Slab-City](http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/anthonyryan)' novels for that term) which allows me to continually look for search terms and changes in found pages, while removing noise from sources I'm interested in. There are a number of reasons I'd like this, one being that back in the day (circa 1997) Symantec made a suite of utilities to register changes in web pages under investigation and provided a meta-search engine application. With the advent of 'push', RSS, and google these applications where deemed obsolete, but now with a move from push/RSS to twitter and with an expansion of search engines, I think the time has come for a fresh look. I'm certainly finding the need for these myself now, after-all when will I know the next Slab City Blue novella is out? Hum I ask you; and finally,

- As an experiment in '[Open Notebook Science](http://onsnetwork.org/)'. I intend to blog about all of this day-to-day and make the repository open so others can make use of it, do better than me (shouldn't be hard) and comment / give me tips as I go (pun intended).

So why isn’t this a traditional HCI project? Well because if it was the HCI would divert me from learning the things I want to learn and move then to just be a conduit for and HCI experiment.

So lets be at it!