Recent content on Liam Symonds

 For over a decade my wife and I (and most recently our daughter) have been holidaying across the many regions
of Scotland. 
 This year, after a few years of pondering and discussing, we’ve made the decision to change our lives and take the
first major step towards realizing a dream by selling our house in the East of England, intentionally becoming
homeless, and…
What do you do when you have appliances housed in an external detached garage that you want notifying of upon their
completion, yet they’re too old to be natively capable and you have a fervent dislike of manufacturer shipped IoT?
You build your own with HomeAssistant (HA) and Zigbee devices, of course! 
 My washing machine and tumbledryer live a few steps away from my house in a…

 I’m Liam. I’m a dad, husband, software engineer, avid DIYer and dog wrangler based in the (not so) sunny East of
England. 
 I’ve been a developer professionally for over 13 years, writing code for close to 20 and have held numerous roles
in industries ranging from leisure to finance to agriculture. I’m currently working as a Lead Software Engineer at
a…
I recently came to the realisation that my home network strategy was not working. Whilst running the stock ISP provided router/AP combo had worked fine for over a decade, my onboarding of more and more untrusted devices onto my network as well as the expansion of the network outside of my home’s four walls started to warrant an investment into better equipment. 
 My first thought was to…
I can’t help but feel that .NET is slowly slipping back into its moated roots but in an open source fashion:
documentation seems to prioritise mentioning Azure above all else; new application frameworks seem to be created with
the sole purpose of promoting and coupling applications to Azure; successful open source libraries are being supplanted
by Microsoft-owned alternatives;…
How many times do you think a developer or development team has looked at some legacy or technical debt-laden software and exclaimed “this bollocks needs a complete rewrite!”? How many times do you think that same “complete rewrite” has led to disaster taking three, four, or more multiples of time than originally anticipated? I’d bet money on most. I’ve seen it…
To those who have been living under an anti-Microsoft-news rock for the last few days, .NET 6 and all of its associated
goodies have arrived, bringing with it C# 10, performance improvements and a boatload of new features. 
 Talk about .NET to anyone outside of the ecosystem (and some in it) and you’ll find they’re still confused by
“what means what”, will ask…
Unit tests are tests that should test an individual section, or unit, within your code. 
 For a long time now, unit tests have been preached as the golden standard in most software development communities. They usually come hand in hand with another development concept: mocking. Mocking is where you ‘fake’ a dependency of the unit that you are testing, so you can test your unit in ‘isolation’.…