Peer review is an essential component of a functional team producing quality software. It allows knowledge transfer, stops obvious and sometimes not-so-obvious bugs reaching production, and it aligns everyone to process and coding standards. In some companies, “peer review” is manager driven. The technical lead or architect reviews the code, and no-one else can. They … More Peer Reviews and Feedback
All software is an abstraction. It’s human-like language with a logical structure to abstract over ill defined business processes, and gates and transistors, and assembly language, and often 7 network layers, and memory management and databases and a myriad of other things that abstractions paper over to help you deliver business value. Abstractions are the … More Abstractions are scaffolding
With the release of Visual Studio 2017 and .net core, I’ve seen a few folk talking about their story with the platform. This is mine. I’ve never been the biggest Microsoft fan, ever since I grabbed a copy of Mandrake Linux and figured out how much more tinkering was available and how much more logical … More My .net journey
Here’s a little something that stumped us for a few days and might be worth posting to save others time. Following a move to IIS8.5, we started seeing “Out of resource” errors on a server that did not appear to be bottlenecked by disk, CPU or RAM. It turns out that since a previous version … More Windows resource limit in services
I was fortunate enough to attend an event at The Data Lab in Edinburgh today on the new General Data Protection Regulation, coming to the EU and the UK. There were 4 talks from a variety of angles, but for me the key takeaways were that the primary thrust of the regulation is about prevention … More Primer : A tech view of GDPR
When I interview people for a job, I look for their skills, but most of all, I need people on my team who love to learn. I was thinking about this when I listened to Rick Strahl talking on .Net Rocks When I started developing, there was a lot of talk about certifications and becoming … More Good developers learn
There’s been a popular stereotype about good programmers being productively lazy. Automating tasks to avoid work. It’s an easy thing to share but I don’t think it’s quite true. It’s about reducing inefficiency. It’s not that developers don’t want to work, we want to do interesting work. Not repetitive work, not work that gets binned, … More ! Not the lazy programmer
There’s a ongoing debate about non-functional requirements: Non-Functional Requirements Are Not Nonsense and it’s a debate I’ve had within my teams as well. In most consulting projects I’ve seen, non-functional requirements are listed as a nice to have, rather than a must have. It’s not a matter of business logic vs. performance either. In one … More Non-functional requirements and terrific testers
Even though I trust my team. As a technical lead, I think code reviews are essential to ensuring the quality of the code. On a project I worked on, due to changes in Project Management, I ended up switching between code reviews as standard and code reviews by exception, and in every case, releases delivered … More Why I prefer pessimistic merging
1 Automation means fixing it once. Although please note that fixing it once doesn’t mean always fixed. I’ve got a 20 year old Mandelbrot generator that still works but I’ve had to tweak as the C compiler evolved. The algorithm is the same, but I had to modify the implementation slightly as GCC changed how … More 12 reasons why I love software development
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