I am a perfectionist by nature. Releasing software in to the wild that has imperfections annoys me. For that matter, doing anything that is imperfect annoys me. Thankfully, there is this little thing called reality that I sometimes get smacked around by and learn from. One of my … | Continue reading
There are few of us left who rode the first wave of what we now call “Agile Software Development” who don’t think something has gone very wrong with “Agile”. At the tail-end of the 1990’s, it was all about small self-organising teams working closely with their customers to rapidl … | Continue reading
I wanted to take a moment to spitball some thoughts about user experience and how it fits within the software development process. I’ve always believed that UX is a central pillar of software design and development. When you think about it, it’s all about the user’s experience. Y … | Continue reading
In the late 1940s, a genuine mystery gripped the world as it rebuilt after WWII. Thousands of eye witnesses – including pilots, police officers, astronomers, and other credible observers – reported seeing flying objects that had performance characteristics far beyond any known na … | Continue reading
I recently bought new carpets for my home, and the process of getting a quote was very interesting. First, I booked an appointment online for someone to come round and measure up. This appointment took about an hour, and much of that time was spent entering measurements into a so … | Continue reading
One of the biggest giveaways about how a lot of employers view software developers is the way they handle their high-performing teams. I’ve seen it happen many, many times; a dev team does a great job delivering something of high value to the business, and at the end the business … | Continue reading
For pretty much all my freelancing and consulting career, I’ve strongly advocated driving software development directly from testable end user goals. I’m not talking here about use cases, or the “so that…” art of a user story. I’m talking actual goals. Not “reasons to use the sof … | Continue reading
One of my biggest bugbears as a software developer is how casually many developers of tools, libraries, services and frameworks make changes that aren’t backwards compatible. It breaks my first rule of software development: Thou shalt not break shit that was working I acknowledge … | Continue reading