by Richard | Nov 6, 2018 | Culture, Introspection
I’d like to introduce a concept of “anti-tooling” – which is “tooling that makes it easier to make our situation worse”. There’s 2 main flavours of this that I’ve noticed: the first is tooling that helps us to do something...
by Richard | Nov 6, 2018 | Conferences
Here’s the slides I used for my talk yesterday at SkillsMatter, on the subject of Designing Messages, with patterns and pitfalls. Designing Messages – PowerPoint Designing Messages – PDF
by Richard | Sep 7, 2018 | Culture
We should always be trying to learn; every day we come into contact with new information, with new ideas, and with feedback on our previous efforts. This should profoundly change our approach, based on a simple and fundemental truth: We always know today the least we...
by Richard | Jul 22, 2018 | Planning & Estimating
One of the areas we’ve really been working on with one of my teams is their approach to planning, and choosing what to work on next. The organization have – like many – a background in running projects in a way that would probably not be unfair to describe as...
by Richard | May 14, 2018 | Practical
Thanks once again to all of you who came along to my session at MicroCPH, and to the organizers for doing such a great job! Here’s the slides from my talk, there’s 2 versions, one with my notes and one without. Designing Messages (Light) Designing Messages...
by Richard | Jan 1, 2018 | Culture, Software Career, War Stories
An observation I’ve made while working with various teams is that there are a relatively small number of things that separate the men from the boys (so to speak). My experience tells me that knowledge of technologies, frameworks, languages and so on is not a big...
by Richard | Dec 26, 2017 | Practical
The other day I was working on something in a largish .Net codebase where there were a lot of Nuget packages that needed work. Most of the time the main tool for this is the Nuget Package Manager, the standard UI, and this is fine for one-at-a-time scenarios. However...
by Richard | Nov 29, 2017 | Culture, Practical
When working on a codebase as a team, especially in a corporate environment, there are choices you can make that can have unexpected impacts. The tendency is for a standardized build, and on the surface this can be appealing. It’s easier for procurement, because...
by Richard | Nov 29, 2017 | Culture, Testing
When teams start out with writing tests for their codebase, it’s very common to have difficulties because certain types of code are harder to test or “untestable”. A mistake that’s commonly made is to try to use mocks or similar, and make a...
by Richard | Nov 29, 2017 | Practical, War Stories
When building a distributed system, you need a way of communicating between the components or services, and this is often a message bus. Message buses come in different forms, but ultimately use the same paradigms – commands and events. One of the earlier distributed...
