I laugh every year when I see this meme about updating your website footer: https://twitter.com/iamdevloper/status/1212320688050229249 If you're a developer who has come from the world of Wordpress where using PHP to dynamically update the year in the footer then I'm sure you're … | Continue reading
This is a great documentary from Valve sharing the story from the original dev team of how Half-Life was developed. A great watch! How on earth is it 25 years since it came out? I feel old. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbZ3HzvFEto | Continue reading
Testing out posting notes from my blog via APIs. The aim is to post once and syndicate the content to multiple social media platforms following the POSSE idea - Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. Let's see how this works! | Continue reading
👋 Testing out posting notes from my blog via APIs. The aim is to post once and syndicate the content to multiple social media platforms following the POSSE idea - Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. Let's see how this works! | Continue reading
If you're like me, your early blogs were probably hosted using Wordpress. Most of my personal sites started off with a self-hosted version of Wordpress on a server that I had to maintain and update. I'm getting too old for the constant updates that owning a server requires so I h … | Continue reading
One of the questions people ask when starting their journey into testing their JavaScript code is where to start. What functions should the team test? Do we need to test every function, or should we look at testing the whole API end-to-end? Do we have mock out all of our backend … | Continue reading
Each week one of my new team makes a release and deployment of our API service from our GitLab repository. It is a very manual process that involves working out what has changed in the previous commits, determining what sort of version it should be, tagging it in GitLab, and runn … | Continue reading
In the middle of January 2021, I decided to start a habit of writing. I was inspired by the #ship30for30 community I'd seen on Twitter. The hashtags were appearing daily and I thought a writing habit would be good to start and could be a useful tool to clarify my thinking. Here a … | Continue reading
I've never liked the title Junior Developer. I much prefer Less-Experienced Developer. It doesn't imply age. It just says "you don't have the knowledge yet". Being a Less-Experienced Developer is where we all start. We might be less-experienced in software development as a whole. … | Continue reading
Being comfortable is a good thing, especially when you start a new job. You've got to know your colleagues, you've found your way around the office or if you're working remote, the company intranet. You can quickly find documentation on Confluence and know how to find Jira ticket … | Continue reading
In software development, there's always been the idea of the 10x or rockstar developer. A programmer that's so talented, that they can write software in double quick time, with their eyes closed, and also in their sleep. I've worked with developers like this. With a few exception … | Continue reading
When I was young, I used to love watching TV when I got in from school. I was a child of the 70s and 80s here in the UK so I only had about 1.5 to 2 hours of children's TV until the soap operas and news started. I'd eat my dinner and then jump on to my VIC-20 or C64. They had no … | Continue reading
I had an interesting catch up with a wonderful colleague, Blanca Garcia Gil, today. We talked about the role of a software engineering team lead and also about giving and receiving feedback. After giving me a compliment which I didn't expect, she noticed that I was taken aback by … | Continue reading
The dictionary defines success as: “The accomplishment of an aim or purpose” Everyone wants to feel successful. But what does it mean to you? What is the aim or purpose of your life? Peter Drucker, one of the great theorists on management techniques, has been attributed with the … | Continue reading
I went to the Lead Developer Conference back in 2019. Pat Kau gave a fantastic talk called "Flavours of technical leadership". In the talk, he shared different ways that engineering leaders develop and make a difference to their teams. One of his thoughts really resonated with me … | Continue reading
People have talked about remote working in the technology industry for many years. Some companies, such as Basecamp, GitHub, and GitLab have embraced it for years whilst others have pushed back, expecting most teams to co-locate in office spaces. Some have had a mix of remote-fri … | Continue reading
Teams want to write great code. They want to communicate and collaborate on their software. Sharing code via a pull request is a great way to present your code for review by your peers. A pull request is a way to create a new feature branch which you're asking to be merged into y … | Continue reading
I recently attended an "away day" for the leadership team of our department. In early 2021, an "away day" obviously means another set of Zoom meetings. It was a great day of digging into the challenges of the team and there were a couple of guest speakers with amazingly inspiring … | Continue reading
At the end of last year I converted my DJ Cruze website from Wordpress to Eleventy. Much like this website, it's easy to deploy using Netlify. Moving to a statically generated site made it much easier to update and avoided me having to maintain a server, PHP, Wordpress versions, … | Continue reading
We often think of learning as something we do at school, college, or university. You learn new skills as you start your career but often, people stop thinking they need to continue as they get older. It often feels like learning is something that we encourage our children to do b … | Continue reading
If you're playing along at home, you'll know that I embarked on a 30-day writing habit challenge to myself. I want to attempt to kickstart a habit, and feel like I was getting better at putting pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard. I don't think I'm a bad writer, but I've always … | Continue reading
Building an online audience is a great way to build your career. The more people who see your writing or videos, the more your network can expand. This can help you to connect with more people and create more opportunities for your career. This video by the writer and entrepreneu … | Continue reading
All developers want to ship code on a daily basis. But how can we ensure that the code we're pushing out to our users won't break? There are plenty of good practices we can use to ensure we can confidently release new versions of our applications. Here are a few that I think are … | Continue reading
I love gifs! I used to create them in the 90s when I was learning how to build my early websites. It was probably mostly the animated "under construction" gif. They went out of fashion in the late 90s due to better file formats and a patent on the gif format. When Slack was … | Continue reading
I wrote video games for about 20 years and for a long time I made games for the Sony PlayStation consoles. Sony were famous for using rubber ducks in their console announcement demos. Here's some old footage of the PlayStation 3 announcement from the wonderful Phil Harrison: http … | Continue reading
I've always loved the following saying: “A rising tide lifts all boats” Although John F Kennedy may have borrowed it from the chamber of commerce of the New England Council, the idea behind it really resonates with me. The true meaning behind it was to suggest that an improved ec … | Continue reading
I once found a wonderful comic by Zach Weinersmith of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal (SMBC). I've told a lot of people about it so please go and read it now. It states that most people think that they only live once and spend their life thinking they can only have one career. … | Continue reading
One of my team asked me a fantastic question today. “How do I stay on top of learning about software development technologies and best practices?” There's an information overload in the software development world. Every day there's a new framework, a new library, a new technology … | Continue reading
Over the past couple of years I've been moving my personal websites from using WordPress to simple static HTML sites. WordPress is fantastic but I spent too much time being concerned about security risks, updating to new versions, and worrying about managing PHP versions on a ser … | Continue reading
Nobody sets to build complex software. All developers set out with best laid plans to keep applications simple. We separate the concerns of the code with nice APIs and interfaces. We abstract our business logic away from our domain services. It's as simple as we can make it but o … | Continue reading
Some days I can't shut my brain off. I often worry about something that happened at work or home. Sometimes I remember a situation that happened in the mid-90s when I was DJing in a nightclub. Yes, this regularly happens and I'm always surprised I can remember that far back! Toda … | Continue reading
I love helping people to automate their lives. Back in 2018/19, I spent a lot of time building automated chatbots using the Facebook Messenger platform. It was a great way for businesses to automate interactions with their customers. More recently, Facebook have made it much hard … | Continue reading
I worked in the video games industry for almost 20 years. I made quite a few games and worked on many more unreleased demos. Every company I worked at was incredibly secretive about their work. Very few teams shared what they were working on externally. Some didn't even share muc … | Continue reading
I was shy as a teenager. Really shy. The sort of shy where I'd blush bright red if somebody I didn't know talked to me. The sort of shy where I'd blush bright red if I knew them too! Since my teenage years, the thought of having to get up in front of people and give a speec … | Continue reading
I write a lot of notes both in my job and in my personal life. I've tried a lot of different note taking applications over the years and more recently I've started using Obsidian Notes as my application of choice. Let's look at how to use the Obsidian Notes application for writin … | Continue reading
Every time we write software we incur technical debt. Every decision to add new code to a project has the potential to introduce new bugs. Over time a team will introduce disorder to their systems as new features are built and technical architecture changes. So how can you encour … | Continue reading
I didn't set out to become a manager of software engineers. One day I was the principal software engineer on the team. The next I'd shifted to a management track. I initially wasn't sure if I'd made the right move but I now really love building great software teams. I've dipped i … | Continue reading
At the start of 2020, I wrote a review of 2019. One of my main goals for last year was to find my writing "voice". The plan was to write more in 2020 but I wrote a grand total of 1 blog post. I'm not sure that a single blog post can really be considered a big win for my writing! … | Continue reading
If you're a developer, and you hang out on developer Twitter, then you'll have seen people sharing their hot code tips. They're often accompanied by code examples and the "hot tip" fire or lightbulb emojis. Here's a great example from Simon Høiberg: JavaScript Tip Make an argum … | Continue reading
Want to learn more about testing your JavaScript code but don't know where to start? Get my FREE 7-day testing course and you'll be a JavaScript testing expert in no time! Understanding types of software testing Permalink to "Understanding types of softw … | Continue reading
Want to learn more about JSON? Want to learn about the magic of JSON without being a developer? Get my FREE JSON guide and you'll have JSON skills in no time! Watch the video Permalink to "Watch the video" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDrGpc4Dp … | Continue reading
I started my 2020 by thumbing through Twitter as I often do, and often try to avoid doing. Between the technology and political tweets were personal 2019 reviews and retrospectives. In software development, we use the idea of the agile sprint retrospective). A sprint is a period … | Continue reading
Facebook Messenger chatbots are a great addition to your marketing toolbox but they have one big problem. Facebook controls the platform and can change its rules when it wants to. Their recent changes to their broadcast and subscription messaging rules means it's more difficult t … | Continue reading
Here in the UK we have an organisation called Code Club which aims to help all children learn to code. It's a network of volunteers and educators who run free coding clubs for 9 to 11 year olds. I have two children, aged 7 and 9, and I want to encourage them to learn more about c … | Continue reading
Error handling is a big part of writing code and it's something that every developer should think about. When starting to write code, it's easy to overlook what happens when your code fails. As developers we like to assume we write perfect code. We never do though do we?! If you' … | Continue reading
One of the often asked questions about unit testing is "how do I ensure I'm writing good quality unit tests?" It's easy to start of down the path of writing unit tests for your code but you need to make sure you're writing dependable tests which are easy to maintain. In this arti … | Continue reading
I was swiping through my Twitter timeline the other night when I saw a really interesting tweet from Kent C Dodds, a great JavaScript developer who works at PayPal, and someone you should really follow on Twitter if you don't already. He asked the following question. [POLL]: Is i … | Continue reading
For Halloween back in 2015, I had an unused Raspberry Pi and decided that I should make a Halloween project in order to learn electronics again, and to scare the local children as they came trick or treating. I connected the Raspberry Pi GPIO pins to a breadboard with a big red d … | Continue reading