Independent Software Consultant
Independent Software Consultant
Exploring software architecture ideas, examples and frameworks. From DDD and architecture types to mapping and diagramming.
Did you ever think that test-driven development (TDD) couldn’t be for you because you’re a developer and you want to write code? Me too. After reading the book and practising TDD for a short while you will discover that it’s not about the tests, it’s about the design. A better name for TDD could be …
I’ve just listened to a wonderful Screaming in the Cloud podcast episode with Corey Quinn and Google VP Chen Goldberg who leads the Cloud Runtimes (CR) product area. This means she’s in charge of Kubernetes and Google Run (GCP’s serverless for those who didn’t know – I didn’t know). This episode expertly negotiates the Kubernetes …
In the recent MapCamp, I had the pleasure of hearing a talk by Susanne Kaiser about the ‘sweet spot’ of modern thinking when it comes to software business development, aligning business needs with customer needs and building software and teams that are optimised for both. Her presentation covers the impressive sweep of three exciting parts …
The amount of existing investment made in a software product often puts us off from continuing to support it. Instead, encouraged by a new generation of excitable techies, we decide to rewrite it. And six months or a year later you’re not only supporting the old system, but you’re also supporting a new system and …
UX or UI? User Experience or User Interface. Is there a difference? Ask any designer this and they will roll their eyes. Of course there’s a difference because there is – or there should be – design processes happening. When building “the front-end”, the developer often looks around for inspiration. Finding things that they like, …
Sometimes you don’t realise you’re in an engineering hole, ever. You keep on applying the next fix – be it code, be it a system, be it a framework, be it a decision. You’re so focussed on building the thing that you forget what it is you’re trying to achieve. Invention isn’t what you need. …
My favourite ever film is the black comedy and pastiche of Orwellian dystopia that is Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. I love the film so much I even called my eldest after the hero, Sam Lowry. It features the cream of British and American acting: Jonathan Pryce, Ian Holm, Robert de Niro to name just a few. …
Firstly, let’s get two things straight: Secondly, you might have noticed that a whiteboard session doesn’t need to use an actual whiteboard anymore. You can collaborate via ‘whiteboard’ in Teams, you can do it in Zoom, you can get plugins for miro and figma or mural or clickup. There are many options and many overlapping …
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is twenty years old (well, officially the version we use today is only 16 years old … but the name is 20). We are two decades into public cloud and the confusion is still real. But why? What does “going to the cloud” mean? And what skills do we need to …