Recent content on Ian Nelson
There are two loving cups on a shelf in my office. They sit next to each other now, deliberately, having spent the previous several years in less considered arrangements. Putting them on display side by side was the work of an idle Sunday last month, when I was clearing out the last vestiges of childhood from what used to be known as the playroom until it was vacated by our youngest teenager, and…
Earlier this week I published a reflective post on how agentic coding has changed my working day and the shape of the profession. I now want to turn to the other side of that coin: not the philosophy, but the mechanics — the habits, the workflows, the accumulated tricks that turn agentic coding from an occasionally impressive demo into a dependable way of working. This post is my field manual.…
At the start of 2026, my working day looked roughly as it had done for the past couple of decades. I would open my IDE in the morning, and close it in the evening, and in between I would write code by typing it into a window designed for that purpose. Carefully and diligently, always trying to envisage myself as a journeyman stonecutter whose work would ultimately be part of some great cathedral…
“Would it help if we reduced the number of questions from fifteen to ten?” That was the response when I asked what I had thought was a fairly ordinary question: “What’s the algorithm?” I had just joined a small marketing company that had decided it was actually a new media IT company. They had landed a project connected with Pedigree Chum and the Crufts Dog Show.…
I was in two minds about whether to bother writing up my annual review of the books I most enjoyed this year. Then I saw a LinkedIn post from my erstwhile colleague Majd Yafi saying how much he enjoys these end‑of‑year reading round‑ups, and my wife added that they make me seem “more human”. That felt like reason enough, particularly in a year marked by an ever‑increasing tide of AI‑generated…
Back at the start of 2019, when the NHS App had just launched, it had something of a discoverability problem. The kind of problem where people would type “NHS App” into the App Store search bar and be presented with results including Microsoft Outlook, WhatsApp, Candy Crush and in fact pretty much anything but the NHS App. Not ideal for a flagship digital health intervention. I was…
Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Embrace the Betweening When you’re in between contracts, it’s easy to feel like you’re stuck in limbo. Professionally adrift, spiritually buffering, half-dressed in last Thursday’s joggers. You refresh LinkedIn. You reword your bio again. You stare into the fridge like it’s about to make you an offer. Somewhere around day four,…
I lost my contract this week . A narrowing of scope . A bit of internal restructuring. The kind of small shift that leaves no room for a tech lead who only joined the project a few months ago. It stings a bit, of course, but not in a way that surprises me any longer. I’ve been in the game long enough to know that not every project will cross the finish line and make it into production.…
My contract with NHS England has come to an abrupt end sooner than expected following a narrowing of focus within the Digital Prevention Services Portfolio. The team I was leading — designing and building components of a National Screening Platform — has been stood down. The work: making legacy health data interoperable and event-driven, surfacing screening journeys in the mighty NHS App, and…
In the early hours of Sunday morning, my daughter Isla was admitted to hospital with tonsillitis so severe she could no longer swallow. As a parent, it was a worrying time. As a tech lead working on national health infrastructure, it was quietly illuminating. I’m currently helping to build the National Screening Platform for NHS England — a set of systems designed to make the flow of patient…
There’s no television in our shared family living areas any more. The imposing screen that once sat at the heart of the home, the altar of sofas and the focus of countless evenings, has been repurposed. It now lives in Matthew’s playroom, where it serves primarily as a large Xbox monitor. And you know what? I don’t miss it. Jocelyn and I just don’t seem to watch television…
Once upon a desk, there was always a notebook. In the older photos of my computer setups that I shared recently, charting the rise and fall of my monitor empire , you can usually spot a notebook or journal somewhere on the desk. Often it was a trusty Pukka Pad. Occasionally, when I was in my more self-consciously pretentious moods, it was a Moleskine or Leuchtturm 1917. Between 2017 and 2023 it…
There was a time, not so very long ago, when I firmly believed that my productivity was directly proportional to the number of screens on my desk. One screen? You’re a civilian. Two? Getting serious. Three? Welcome to the big leagues. Four? Now we’re talking. Five? You, sir, are a professional. Possibly even a Bond villain. For much of my adult life – from 1997 to 2022 — I was on a…
There are moments in the lifecycle of a project – quiet, almost undetectable ones – that act as inflection points. Not the big set-piece go-live days, with all the nervous Splunk-watching that entails. Not the kick-offs, not the design sign-offs. Just those little glimmers of “Oh, this is actually working.” One of those glimmers happened today. We’re a relatively new team, starting to build a new…
I know, I know, you’ve heard all this before . Once again Ian is migrating his blog from one platform to another. And yes, it’s true that I have spent more of my life converting my blog posts between different platforms and markup languages than I ever have actually writing the damn blog posts in the first place. There’s a certain pleasing symmetry to it. I began my blogging life…
Since 2018 I’ve been reading far more than I used to. Partly that’s because my kids have grown older and don’t need quite as much of my time (though they still seem to need quite a lot of money). But it’s also thanks to Audible. I’ve been listening to audiobooks while I walk the dog, potter about the house, and commute — effectively turning previously…
For most of my adult life, in a way typical of those of us from the North, I have disdained London. Too big. Too busy. Too smug. Too… London . I’ve long maintained that its gravitational pull distorts the rest of the country, and that one’s quality of life improves in direct proportion to one’s distance from Zone 1. And yet — I am beginning to suspect that, deep down, behind my…
Back in 2022, in a bid to outwit my mother in our daily Wordle battles, I wrote some C# code to explore optimal starting guesses. You can read about that experiment here . Fast forward two years, and my Wordle addiction is alive and well. The daily challenge remains as compelling as ever, but it’s the family WhatsApp group – where scores are shared, victories boasted, and failures commiserated –…
As 2024 draws to a close, I’ve taken some time to reflect on the books that made the greatest impact on me this year. From deep dives into technology and politics to introspective reads on life and risk, these are the titles that enriched my year – and might just enrich yours too. If you pressed me on the subject, I would say that my very favourite book of 2024 was Burn Book: A Tech Love Story by…
I had the pleasure of spending ISO Week 42 in the beautiful Portuguese coastal city of Porto, attending the NDC Porto 2024 conference for software developers by NDC Conferences . It’s been a long time since I attended a multi-day conference – perhaps even as long ago as Software Architect 2007 (where I first learned about Dependency Injection and IOC Containers) which makes me feel quite ancient.…
Politics on the Edge: A Memoir from Within by Rory Stewart My very favourite book of 2023 was this autobiography by former Minister and one-time candidate for Conservative Party leader Rory Stewart. I almost didn’t read it at all, as I was feeling a little jaded with politics at the time and considering a more light-hearted Audible purchase. I’m glad I plumped for this though, and it did offer…
Folks, this is your lucky day — Ian Nelson is back on the market. After an unprecedented five years working the same gig, I will be available for shiny new contract roles from February 2023 (edit: now April 2023, thanks to a short extension) . Download my CV here . Email me at ian@iannelson.uk What I’ve Been Doing Recently Since March 2018 I’ve been a Technical Lead for the NHS App , an…
The Top 5 Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention by Johann Hari My favourite book of the year partially covers the same ground as previous favourites A World Without Email , Four Thousand Weeks , and Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now . But the scope of Hari’s work is much broader than these. Rather than merely telling us to stop doomscrolling Twitter and get on…
Yesterday morning I arose unusually early for a Saturday and drove eastwards to attend this year’s DDDNorth at the University of Hull. These free, community-driven events held at the weekend offer an invaluable opportunity to learn from peers in the industry in a relaxed environment. Five concurrent sessions in each timeslot means that tough decisions often have to be made about which to attend!…
Ben: “Ian, Ian!” Me: “Ben, I’m ‘Daddy’ to you.” Ben (quizzically): “But you are ‘Ian’ as well.” Me: “Yes, I know that, but I’d prefer it if you called me ‘Daddy’.” Ben: “Oh. Sorry, Ian!” August 2010 Ben: “Can I have another bedtime story Dad?” Me: “Not tonight Ben, it’s too late and you’re too tired.” Ben: “I’m not, I’m not, grumbled Ben!” August 2010 Whilst sat at the dinner table this evening:
Another visit to Stanage Edge to admire the mighty Stanage Pole . This time with my daughter Isla in tow, rather than my mum . Strava link
Another enjoyable day out scrambling with my daughter Isla. The scramble itself is part of Route 27 in Scrambles In The Dark Peak by Tom Corker and Terry Sleaford . A wander along the north-western edge of the Kinder Scout plateau afforded some impressive views across to Manchester. We joined the Pennine Way for a short while, before heading back down the Snake Path. Strava link
Like (it would seem) most of the rest of humanity, the start of my 2022 has been immeasurably enhanced by starting each day playing Josh Wardle’s charming word game Wordle . Which got me wondering – what are the best starter words to play in the opening lines at Wordle? I have been habitually using “ ADIEU ” as my starter word, reasoning that it contains a large number of vowels. But is D a…
The Top 5 And Away… by Bob Mortimer As was the case in 2020, my favourite book of the year was an autobiography; this time by national treasure Bob Mortimer. Laugh out loud funny in many places, elsewhere this is tinged with melancholy and the realisation that, for all his on-screen tomfoolery, Mortimer is an incredibly shy individual. Touching, contemplative, warm and kind throughout, there is…
I’m on a break between contracts this week, so decided to make the most of the good weather and headed into the Peak District to revisit Stanage Edge for the first time since 2000. Unlike my last visit twenty years ago , there were no ropes or belays involved this time. Instead my Mum and I had a leisurely wander in the blistering July sunshine up part of the Long Causeway , before taking some…
My daughter Isla pronounced our April walk up Pen-y-Ghent to have been “a bit boring”. Apparently she enjoyed the scrambling and the views but not the lengthy slog. Fair enough. So, looking for something more interesting for our next Dad and Daughter trip into the hills, I armed myself with a copy of “ Scrambles In The Dark Peak ” by Terry Sleaford and Tom Corker, and today we set off to tackle…
A lovely spring Sunday walk up Pen-y-ghent in the Yorkshire Dales with my daughter Isla (her first hike up a proper hill). It was most liberating to get out into the hills after so many months stuck at home or staying local due to the coronavirus pandemic.
So that, then, was 2020. Good riddance. One might imagine that the enforced downtime offered by the pandemic lockdowns would have afforded me the opportunity to read many more books than I did in 2019. But a displeasing proportion of my evenings in 2020 were spent relentlessly doomscrolling Twitter, eager for the latest morsels of information about the pandemic, US election or (sigh) Brexit.…
As the resident geek in our family, it won’t surprise you to hear that I am occasionally approached by Jocelyn and our kids to provide tech support. Sadly, most of these queries are invariably of the “how do I print from my phone” or “the Sky box stopped working” ilk, and rarely trouble my software skills. So it came as a pleasant surprise when I recently encountered a genuine reason to use .NET,…
One of the game-changing features of Synology ‘s NAS (Network-Attached Storage) devices is their ability to run Docker , the industry-standard containerization technology. This opens up the possibility of running all kinds of applications on the NAS, turning them into home servers with boundless possibilities. One of things I wanted to run on my own Synology NAS is RabbitMQ , the popular…
Near the end of 2018, I stumbled upon a thread of tweets by First Minister of Scotland Nicola Sturgeon in which she shared some of the many books that she had enjoyed during that year. I was both amazed and ashamed that a leader of a nation could consume so much literature whilst I, a mere sellsword codemonkey, barely got through a book every month (or two). It wasn’t that I didn’t enjoy reading –…
Day One – Saturday 26th May 2018 Twenty years after bagging my first Munro – the dreary Meall a’ Chrasgaidh – and somehow developing an affinity for the Great Scottish Outdoors, I found myself heading northwards once again. Not this time in the company of my university friends, but instead with a ten-year-old boy in tow, namely my eldest Son, Benjamin. It was half-term holiday, he had just…
I had no excuse for not attending DDDNorth this year, as it was held at Leeds University, a relatively short drive from home. Not that I’d be looking for an excuse – these free events are always superbly organised and provide a valuable opportunity to see sessions from a wide range of speakers without having to take time off work. It’s no wonder the tickets are always snapped up so quickly.
“We who cut mere stones must always be envisioning cathedrals” — Stonecutter’s creed Consider for a moment, if you will, the humble Boolean. Taking only two possible values, it is the most basic of all the data types we programmers use, and its existence is fundamental to all the code we write. At the end of the day, when all is said and done, everything we do is just a big bunch of ones and…
As a lowly sellsword amongst the ensemble cast that make up the incestuous York/Leeds IT scene, I am not usually one to be influenced by the promise of titles and honours. Time was, long ago, in my first graduate job, that I yearned for a promotion from “Solution Developer” to “Development Specialist”. Now I give little consideration to what I’m called, and sell my services on the basis of what I…
My first printer was a Star LC-20 nine pin dot matrix that I received as a Christmas present when I was 15 years old. That’s the kind of nerdy teenager I was, folks. All yuletide long our home rang out with the deafening noise made by those pins rapidly and repeatedly punching through a flimsy ink-soaked ribbon. Incidentally, Radio 4 are forever running features about the ongoing decline in…
I have been merrilly using NCrunch – an “automated concurrent testing tool for Visual Studio” – for almost three years now. I ponied up for a paid license when it made the transition from beta to RTM, and I recently shelled out again for an upgrade to version 2. Why?! Why do this when plenty of test runners are free, or bundled with software I already own such as ReSharper and Visual Studio…
Blogging Again Right then, let’s give this blogging lark another shot, shall we? I’ve had some form of blog online since the summer of 1997 (back when they were called online journals or simply ‘homepages’). For most of that time my web presence was a single unfocussed site containing posts about all manner of things - a mixture of diary style witterings, some technical…
Proudly presenting a new addition to the family – Mr Matthew Henry Nelson: He arrived at 0624 local time on the morning of Saturday 1st September, and weighed in at 7 pounds 6 ounces. This was 17 days sooner than expected, and his early arrival literally caught his Daddy napping – while Jocelyn was giving birth in York, I was sleeping soundly in a Reading Novotel ahead of the DDD10 conference .…
Are you plagued by bad code smells? Troubled by slow-running database queries and ETL routines? In need of some scalable and maintainable enterprise integration solutions? Look no further! As luck would have it, legendary Leeds-based freelance software developer Ian F. Nelson is now available again for contract opportunities. Fresh from a 42-week stint at the Health and Social Care Information…
In the grand scheme of things, ’tis but a minor achievement, but I was quite chuffed with myself this evening when my Stack Overflow reputation finally reached the 10,000 mark: My girls made me a special “10K” cake to celebrate 🙂 Kudos to Jeff , Joel and the team for creating a site that I have found engaging, entertaining and very useful for the last 3 years and 4 months.
Almost everyone who has wandered past the various desks that I’ve occupied over the last year has passed comment on my Wacom Bamboo Pen Graphics Tablet . So, let me say a few words about my experiences with that. For the longest time, I had been perfectly content to use various Logitech VX / MX mouses as my secondary input device, occasionally using a Microsoft Arc Mouse (very convenient to carry…
This dumb mistake just cost me an hour spelunking around in the debugger: var status = source.Substring(source.LastIndexOf("/" + 1)); (where source is e.g. “ http://foo.com/status/all-is-good “) Fortunately the ramifications were picked up in the acceptance tests, but the root cause wasn’t at all obvious from such a high level. Lesson for the day – code is never too trivial to warrant unit…
It’s been a long time since I posted a blog entry in the “ genealogy ” category (over three years, in fact). I find it to be a hobby that I pursue in fits and starts – periods of all-encompassing obsession followed by long periods of total inactivity. But the old Family Tree has been fleshed out nicely since I last updated you, dear reader. It has also acquired a most surprising and welcome…
This is the fifth in a series of five posts recounting my experiences using Entity Framework Code-First to replace ADO.NET and stored procedures in a client’s existing application. The introductory post in the series is here . I am lucky to have had the opportunity to spend a time-boxed period playing with Entity Framework Code-First in a real-world scenario, and to get paid for the privilege! I…