Today there are certainly more developers out there, but they’re not very visible - a Google search for “PHP Developer Portsmouth” throws up pages of job ads, rather than pages of local PHP developers. Other technology- and location-specific searches return similar results.

In an effort to change this, and to make the local development community a bit more “joined-up”, I’ve been collecting local developers’ blogs. I’m hopeful that in the long-term these blogs will form the core of a local web development community, but at the very least, if we talk to each other, if we’re active online and network around subjects of common interest, it will raise everyone’s profile. I know that Adam Wintle wants to do similar things over at Refresh Portsmouth, so anyone who’s keen on real-world meet-ups should talk to him.

If you’re at all interested in web development on the South Coast, please import this handy OPML file into your RSS reader, and check back for updates occasionally. Alternatively, the HTML list is after the break. If you want to be added to the list, or you know someone who should be on there, please just let me know.

OPML Summary

David Cooper

David is a 21-year-old website developer and designer from Hampshire, UK. His blog - dazecoop - includes a portfolio of the best-of images from David along with interests including Minis, Cars,
Motorsport, Photography, PHP Development, Website Design, Google and lots more.

Howard Durdle

Howard is a geek, a gamer, a company director and sometime surfer. He watches a lot of American TV. He lives in Winchester, and currently contracts for the largest software company in the world. He’s been involved in all kinds of interesting stuff, from ASP/PHP through to iPhone application development, electronics design and network security for the MOD.

Andy Jarrett

Andy is a Senior ColdFusion developer, located in Portsmouth, UK

Daniel Kendell

Daniel is primarily a PHP developer in Fareham. He loves LEDs, most aspects of technology, philosophy and often gets confused in the middle of his own sentences. Not thick, just a bit dense.

Sven Latham

Sven is a freelance IT and systems consultant, based in Gosport. He’s planning a series of articles based on his experiences setting up his own IT company.

David Otton

David is a web developer, currently working in Portsmouth. He has a love/hate relationship with PHP, and thinks the world could use more giant rabbits.

Daniel Pope

Daniel is a Django developer in Chichester (which is close enough). His blog is pretty active, and he writes posts in some interesting areas, such as Python and SVG.

Paul Graham Raven

By day Paul is a rather shabby library assistant in a local museum, but in the evenings he magically transforms into a freelance writer, publicist, web presence manager and social media consultant, webzine editor, book and music reviewer, poet, guitarist and aspiring science fiction short story author. He manages to fit some sleep in every now and again, too.

Rich Sae Kang

Rich is a Portsmouth-based web developer and IT manager. His posts currently lean towards shell scripting and music.

Jasper Tandy

Jasper is a salaried/freelance web developer in Southampton. He lives with a rabbit and a kitten, which is cool.

James Titcumb

James is a PHP web developer living in Whiteley. He works in Fareham for Netbasic. He’s also a Twitter addict, making his blog one of the most frequently updated on this list.

Dominic Winsor

Dominic is a user-experience consultant in Southampton. He’s an ethical shopper, and web developer, usability expert and interaction designer with experience of working with everything from small businesses and charities through to high-street banks.

Adam Wintle

Adam is a Portsmouth-based developer and designer. He appears to have almost scary levels of motivation.

Eddy Young

Eddy is a Hampshire-based Java/C# programmer. His blog tends towards photography.

OPML Summary

I just wasted ten minutes trying to figure that one out.

Wow.

Romeo & Juliet, Wordle Cloud

Apropos nothing, Wordle tagcloud for Romeo & Juliet. Click to view.

This reminds me I really need to play with Processing at some point. Too many tools, not enough time.

Still, right now I’m more concerned with getting my head round Erlang, and the new closure mechanism that’s coming in PHP 5.3 (I really, really wish they’d stop trying to shoehorn the kitchen sink in there).

George, British Giant Rabbit

This is George, the smaller (and more photogenic) of our two house rabbits. No, he hasn’t been photoshopped, although he is a bit foreshortened. That’s a normal-sized broom in the background - I’ve seen him pick up a broom by the handle and throw it to one side rather than walk around it. The two rabbits now weigh a shade under 30lbs, combined.

M&M Glider

I’ve been reshelving books recently, which caused me to pick out and re-read Karl Sigmund’s Games of Life. It’s a great book - unashamedly playful, accessible, pun-dense prose (”Do lynxes let their hare down?”, “Y all those boys?”), which still provides enough detail on a whole raft of biological simulations for you to code up your own versions.

Anyway, a passage at the end of the chapter on John Conway’s Life struck a false note for me this time around. The chapter presents the argument that Life is capable of supporting self-replicating universal Turing Machines, and therefore evolution.

[Aside: It's interesting to note that the "given probability" mentioned below doesn't matter - it could be 0.000001 or 0.999999; all possible patterns will still turn up. Infinity is weird.]

Now let us stretch our imagination somewhat more, and ask about the origin of life in the Life-universe. Conway’s answer is that it is inescapable. Inescapable, at least, under certain rather mild assumptions. If the game board is totally empty, of course, then nothing will ever happen; if, conversely, every cell is occupied then all will be polished off in the next instant; and similarly, there will be countless other initial positions yielding no self-replicating patterns. But these are all special cases. We should not try to tamper too much with Life. The simplest way to distribute matter randomly in the plane would be to have every cell, independently of its neighbours, occupied or not with some given probability. In this case, every conceivable finite pattern will certainly occur somewhere in the infinite plane. (It will even occur infinitely often.) Self-reproducing patterns will therefore also be bound to occur; very sparsely, to be sure, but present nevertheless. In this sense, the world of Life contains life almost as soon as it contains matter.

Many very different configurations will have the property of self-reproduction. They will be submitted to a natural selection of sorts. Some will multiply faster than others. Some will be quickly destroyed by Gliders happening to pass by, or by other patterns crawling across the plane. Some will be more resilient, or simply more lucky. Some will end up suffocated by their own offspring. Some will move too slowly, and some too fast. The proportion of successful patterns is bound to increase. The lifeless environment will change too.

Some automata will evolve rudimentary sense organs to obtain information about their surroundings. Some will develop the faculty to move into the direction which appears the most promising, or to flee from dangers. Some will withdraw into shell-like structures, and some will evolve offensive weapons. There will be species exploiting others, and species set upon cooperation. In due time, multicellular beings are apt to emerge - huge colonies of automata, obeying a common program and begetting other colonies. In order to discover better blueprints, such automata may start to recombine their instructions, using some two-dimensional forms of sexuality. There will be complex types of social interaction, and sooner or later some kind of intelligence too. These patterns will learn to feel and to think.

Only a mathematician could consider an infinite plane a “mild assumption”. This requirement, along with the randomised starting grid, means that simple self-replicators aren’t the only patterns present at t=0 - every possible pattern is already represented. Every possible single-celled organism, multi-cellular organism and intelligent creature that Life can support, and every possible thought and memory that each of those creatures is capable of having - they’re all right there on the plane; infinite copies in infinite combinations. Every future state that a region can evolve into is already out there somewhere else on the plane, so running the simulation at all seems a little pointless.

Additionally, since the system is deterministic, I see no reason why some regions wouldn’t be set up, purely by chance, to “run backwards” (complex creatures de-evolving into single-celled organisms, then into random blocks), make major jumps from one point in the phase space of possible lifeforms to another (equivalent perhaps to a chicken giving birth to a dashchund, which in turn gives birth to a clown fish), or behave in any other way we can imagine. In a system that can and will produce all these outcomes, considering evolution to be noteworthy smacks of observer bias. Yes, it’s probably happening, but so are the dashchunds.

Postscript: Borges’ meditations on infinity.

Slipper, the day we first got her

Madeline just found the baby giant rabbit in the washing machine. Just a head sticking out.

She was evicting the socks; every few seconds another one would go flying.

I guess she’s big enough now that a washing machine looks like a reasonable place to hang out. That’s kinda scary, as she has another six weeks of growing to do. I wish she’d stop eyeing the kitchen bin so speculatively.