by Richard | Oct 6, 2017 | Introspection, War Stories
A couple of weeks back my wife found details of a hackathon event, organized with a local school who work with children with Autism. Luckily I was able to take part – despite the language barrier (I’m slowly learning…) – and it was great fun and a very rewarding...
by Richard | Oct 6, 2017 | War Stories
Every developer at some point in their career has encountered “Legacy Code” – and the phrase usually implies negative connotations. There are usually reasons for this – Legacy Code is normally code that is hard to maintain, perhaps code that has grown...
by Richard | Oct 6, 2017 | Culture, Practical, War Stories
An easy mistake to make with Microservices is simply choosing to use them in the first place, when the context calls for a different solution. Microservices have become “trendy”, all the cool kids are using them, leading to what Thoughtworks call...
by Richard | Oct 5, 2017 | Practical
One of the challenges that face a team when they start thinking in terms of distributed systems – such as Microservices – is eventual consistency. We’re so used to writing software with transactions and ACID style consistency, that this can be un-nerving at...
by Richard | Sep 19, 2017 | Practical
Recently I was helping a client who had found an intermittent issue in their single-page application. This particular issue was that under some circumstances – which they weren’t able to describe, as it wasn’t any particular sequence of actions – the UI...
by Richard | Sep 3, 2017 | Culture, Practical
Building software is often a huge investment – and so it’s no surprise that quality is not something to take lightly! Traditional “Quality Control” focuses on catching bugs, and preventing defects, to manage the user’s experience of the...
by Richard | Jul 6, 2017 | Practical, Software Career
It is sometimes said that the developer mindset is to make stuff work, while the tester mindset is to make stuff break. In modern professional software development though, it is not OK to make testing or quality control “someone else’s problem”, and...
by Richard | Jun 30, 2017 | War Stories
There’s been an article on Reddit recently that I’ve seen via a couple of sources now. The post is a bit of a horror story; a junior developer on his first day of his first job was given an instruction manual on how to set up his machine, and ended up...
by Richard | Jun 30, 2017 | Planning & Estimating, Practical, War Stories
In modern software development, there are all kinds of exotic data storage options available to us – and many reasons why any of these might be good/bad for a certain context. However, there are some basic needs that all systems have, and one of these is that if...
by Richard | Jun 19, 2017 | Practical, Software Career, War Stories
As part of moving from the UK to Poland, I’m trying to find every opportunity to engage with developer communities and meet people here. When I heard the Microsoft Build tour would have an event in Warsaw, I registered on the spot and fortunately was able to...
