Agile and the death of expertise

There have been a number tweets recently regarding Tom Nichol’s article on The death of expertise It’s always very difficult to summarise an article without losing context, so I recommend reading the full article, but I think the essence of the article is in this quote: In any discussion, you have a positive obligation to…

Beginning Sublime Text 3

I’m quite late to the party on this one, as many developers have been using it for years.  As a .NET developer I’ve never paid that much attention to text editors other than Visual Studio but I’ve just heard about Sublime today, and thought I’d check it out. I went for the version 3 beta. It’s very…

DB Engine wars 2014 (Part 1)

While it’s never been trivial, in the past choosing your first db engine was a little more straightforward. If you just needed the basics, you’d choose either PostgreSQL, mySQL or SQL Server Express. If you needed the highest performance, you’d choose between IBM DB2 and Oracle. If you used windows and wanted a middle ground…

Refactoring Forum

Pretty much all businesses that have been around for several years have built up technical debt. Effectively managing that debt is key to keeping your IT development productive and modern. Over that last few months, the company I work for has started a refactoring forum to discuss our strategies for doing just that. We meet…

How important is the right tool for the job?

Not too long ago someone asked me, how could I claim to be an Agile developer when Agile values “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools” and I talk about the tooling more than anything? Firstly, I believe that developers discussing the right tooling IS individuals and interactions. I think that this value statement is really…

Technical Debt

Thanks to Cory House who has released a new Pluralsight course called “Architecting Applications for the Real World in .NET” – I recommend watching it even if you don’t code in .NET In this course he covers technical debt and makes a point that I knew but had never seen any anyone else make before;…

Zombie Code

Zombie code is code that is neither dead or alive. It is undead! As frightening as this sounds, this code is being generated every day and the amount of this code is increasing  all the time and there are hundreds of millions of lines of this code in existence worldwide. Zombie code is code that…