Software development blog of Joe Wright
This week I passed the AWS Solutions Architect exam, making me a certified AWS Solutions Architect. I can see you’ve forgotten the red carpet for me to walk upon, but that’s ok, I’ll wait. Why did I do that exam? Why did I spend five weeks every evening trying to learn about yet another part of AWS? Well, it was for the professional challenge. I’ve long been a hobbyist AWS user. I ran VMs on EC2,…
'top view' by CHUTTERSNAP Your computer just suffered a catastrophic hardware fault. Feck. How much work have you lost? How long will it take you to get a new laptop set up? For me? If you forced me to format my machine right now, I’d lose maybe an hours work, and I’d be productive again in about 40 minutes. How? There are a few techniques that make this possible: Have a Google Chrome Account for…
When reviewing code, I find I can easily be swayed by a romantic interpretation of the code “This looks like my code!” or “Urgh, this bit is hard to understand” . It’s pretty easy to get caught on one part and let that bias your opinion on the whole work. To alleviate this trap, I use a standard marking scheme. I ask the other reviewers to use the same scoring system, and we take an average of the…
As an industry, we are experts at blasting non-production environments with test suites. But we are still amateurs at testing what matters: the environment your customers are using. To fix this, one of the best testing moves you can make right now involves taking a journey test from your deployment pipeline and occasionally running it against your production environment. Let’s think about how we…
Back in December, I read an article by Jessica Joy Kerr on moving from the traditional UNIXy shells to Powershell which caught my interest. I’ve changed shells a few times before and found an improvement each time, so I thought I’d challenge myself to two months with Powershell on Linux and Mac. What I hadn’t noticed at the time was that Jessica was using Windows. When I’ve been a C# developer, I…
“People are NOT our greatest asset. In collaborative knowledge work particularly, it’s the relationships BETWEEN people that are our greatest asset.” – Bob Marshall When you first join a company, you might know your team name, where you sit and where you are in the org chart. But below the org chart is a host of relationships that aren’t formally recognised. You hopefully already have an…
'Hand Trolley' by Hitcom Hello everybody, I’m Joe, and you are watching the agile industrial complex TV. You may remember me from other infomercials such as “How to outsource your customer with a CRM” and “UML: the language we’ll use to speak with aliens.” Can I ask you a question? Are you in the market to scale your IT department? Maybe you have a big project? We here at scaled agile love big…
'Rallying' by Martin Lopez I’ve just remembered the time I was asked to help fix a bug in production and ended up being named by a trade union as a reason they are going on strike. It was my first week at the org after joining via a consultancy. The bug was a NullPointerException with a stack trace and line number. Fairly simple right? Look at the line in question and figure out what has been…
'Questions?' by Stefano Parmesan When I’m the interviewer, I’ve got two questions that I always use. They don’t have a textbook answer. The only way to answer them is by being honest. They are: Tell me about a workplace where you felt you were able to do your best work Tell me about a workplace where you didn’t feel like you could do your best work I always find the answers illuminating. Folk tend…
'Jobs DB job fair' by Ilocos Norte John Gallagher and I were working at a software house that was looking to start hiring graduates. We had 50 developers on staff, but none of us knew how to run a campaign to hiring grads. So we started out doing the same as everyone else. That approach didn’t get us very far. First off we attended career fairs. I’m sure you’ve been to these before. It’s two or…