I went to OpenCoffee Leeds {Tre} yesterday to sample the coffee, cake and geeky conversation. All were excellent, although I got there a bit late and missed the best cake.

I met a lot of interesting people and collected a lot of business cards. I’m not completely sure I’d be able to match faces to cards now. Hopefully I’ll see many of them again. I tried to talk to as many people as possible, but this meant that I only talked very briefly to some people.

I also tried out my new origami business cards, which seemed to go down well. A few people suggested the excellent idea of making them a bit more interactive so I’ve created this Flickr Group for people to post pictures of their folded version of my card.

When I went to the first GeekUp event in Leeds I became very jealous of everyone's lovely business cards. I decided it was time to sort that out and make my own. I wanted mine to be a little bit different and hopefully be something that people would remember.

I've loved origami since my trip to Japan in 2002 and thought this would be an excellent thing to use. I'd also tested the idea in a previous project and it had been very successful.

Now the design is done, they're quite easy to mass produce. The hardest part of the design was drawing the diagrams and making the instructions clear. It's good to flex my artistic muscles though. The true test of how good the instructions are will be if people can follow them.

You can download the origami crane business card template and have a go for yourself.

This may be the first in a series of different origami business cards.

Code Complete is a book that talks you through how to construct computer programs. It doesn't look at any specific language and the things covered apply equally to web applications and pacemaker software.

It talks about the process and really makes you think about the way you do things and the best way to do things. Every chapter has really made me think and hopefully I'll be a better programmer for it. It's the sort of stuff I wasn't taught at university, but think I should have been.

It's been like having a wise programmer share with me a wealth of experience and knowledge. It's made me want to revisit all my programs and re-write them.

One recurring theme in the book is managing complexity. Computer programs and code quickly become complex. If we don't know how to manage and look out for that complexity we'll soon have created monsters of programs that we don't really understand and can only hope that they do what we want them to.

I wish I'd read this book sooner, and I recommend that all programmers who care about their professionalism should read this (or probably already have).

I'm going to need some time to fully digest and put into practice what I've read. I'll probably also need to read it again.

The road to wisdom is never ending. In the last chapter there is a reading list of books that programmers working for the author's company need to read if they wish to progress and become more professional.

I've read one of them so far. So, it looks like I'm just starting on that road and I have a lot more to learn. 

I was reading a list of the top 40 web apps in .net magazine. I'd heard of many and I couldn't really see how many of them would help me at all.

There was one that had an intriguing name, but I didn't really have high hopes for it. It was called Remember the Milk. It's an online To-Do list.

I've always thought an electronic To-Do list would be a good idea, but when I've tried them, they've never been as good as writing it down on paper.

This one has got it right. It's simple, but lets me keep track of multiple lists in a way that my many notebooks failed me.

It's so simple, yet elegant and it's left me thinking why didn't I think of this and do it first.

Then I realised that I did think of something similar, but my idea had lots more features, did lots more and was much more sophisticated and complicated.

That's why it remained an idea. If you come across a problem and can boil down a solution that will solve that problem in the simplest way, then you've got an idea that might just make it.