Creating maintainable software that adds "real" value
Automated (AI) powered code reviews are becoming increasingly popular and powerful. I use them myself to catch things I miss. But there are questions I ask as a human reviewer that I've yet to see any AI-powered tooling help with. Questions like: Does this fix the cause or the symptoms? Are there related changes that should be addressed while we're in this part of the codebase? Is this just fixing…
Enshittifcation, as a term popularized by Cory Doctrow , has for many become a catch-all term for things generally getting worse. I've found it useful (unsurprising if you know me) to think about it in two categories. There's the popular definition of how very large, dominant platforms change [to get worse] over time as business/organizational priorities change. I think there's a second-order…
It's common for people to refer to early versions of software as MVPs (Minimum Viable Products). Only, that's not what an MVP is meant to be. People say: "ship it early" "try something out" "get feedback" "don't worry about polish" and "you should be embarrassed about these versions" But these aren't descriptions of an MVP; they're descriptions of a prototype, and the two are not the same. A…
Updated Jan 7th 2026 -- see below If you build extensions for Visual Studio, you'll know that sometimes (frequently?--depending on what you're doing) it's necessary to completely reset the experimental instance to get it back to a known/good state. With previous versions, it was possible to start typing in the main Windows menu and it would find the command to do this for you. This was possible…
The cliché always used to be that "contributing to docs was a great way to get started in open source." Now I'm also starting to hear people suggest that writing a test can also be a good entry to a project. But is this a good idea? I'm not sure... Say you have a piece of code that isn't covered by any tests. It's fair to say this isn't an ideal situation to be in. All things being equal, having…
No answers. "Just", questions I'm aware of and considering: If working with AI means communicating with machines more like we do with other humans, how do we avoid things also going back the other way and treating people more like machines? Are "agents the future of [all] work"? And, if not all , how to identify the work that can change or be replaced? If "AI is only as good as your data", why…
TLDR: User groups were great. I miss organising and going to them. Maybe I should revisit my plans about this... I've organized over 100 user group events / meetups. I've also attended and spoken at many others. The one I had the most to do with was the Windows Phone User Group , which later evolved/became Windows Apps London . I "ran" this for as long as it existed. It all seems a very long time…
I often hear that developers aren't keen on doing work to upgrade the frameworks/platforms/tools that they use (or the software they're building is using). It's not writing code, and so it's not considered "real development" work. I think that doing the work to support upgrades or migrations is one of the most important and valuable things a developer can do: It's often a simple way to fix…
Following on from my recent post asking How much does start-up time matter when choosing a framework? I've now published some figures and the code I used. With some minor tweaks, I now have an updated graph of the data: This graph is based on the release builds of the simplest, most minimal apps I could reasonably come up with that were as close to identical in all frameworks. The code and more…
I guess it comes down to different people wanting different things. Or, maybe, I'm looking for different things than the majority of people are looking for. Being aware that I'm trying to learn a variety of new technologies at the moment, and also writing things to try and find a new way of teaching something I'm very familiar with. Here's what I've seen a lot lately: Teachers (either qualified…