This afternoon, I gave two presentations for the nice folks at 42 for their Knowledge Transfer meeting, at Rotterdam's natural history museum. Here are the slides.

In search of the perfect programmer (PDF, 4.2 MB) is a short presentation, to get things started. This is a light-hearted look at the diversity of programmer backgrounds, and a serious point about what that means for programmers, and the people who hire or manage them. At least the jokes got a few laughs.

How to build a decision service using JBoss Rules (a.k.a. Drools) (PDF, 639 KB) is a technical introduction to Drools Expert, the rules engine in JBoss Rules, based on the example of a simple decision service, and focusing on what the code looks like. The decision service source code is available from the earlier article How to build a decision service using JBoss Rules Execution Server, the last of three articles that explain the decision service example in more detail.

Peter Hilton is a senior software developer at Lunatech Research.

Please send comments on this article to editorial@lunatech.com.