This year as one of my professional development goals I set out to earn the Microsoft Certified Azure Solution Architect Expert qualification. I started early in the year, booking the first of two exams in April. The second was in August and I am now certified as an Azure Solution Architect. The courses were interesting [...]

Today I was again researching software quality for an internal presentation and came across some ideas from Martin Fowler I found interesting. The first was from the video keynote Making Architecture Matter to OSCON in 2015. In it he explains that developer’s notions of using moral grounds for spending time to improve the maintainability of [...]

Want to get to know about Open Source Software licensing? Thinking that you might like to use OSS in your business? I recently wrote a white-paper for my employer on just that topic. The target audience for the article is non-technical, and it is not specifically for contributors to open source. It does however cover [...]

Level 4 lockdown in New Zealand will end a minute before midnight on Monday April 27, 2020. As I write this we have been in lockdown for nearly four weeks. It’s been okay for me, and I think also for my family, but I certainly acknowledge we have fewer challenges than many. In lockdown I’ve [...]

Continuing in the spirit of recommending things I both enjoyed and found valuable, here’s some freely available videos that you might enjoy. Moral Philosophy Ever wondered what’s the right thing to do? You probably have given many philosophical questions are ubiquitous and we live them often. If you’ve never thought to enquire in to ethics [...]

It’s been a while since I posted any recommendations and over summer I read a bunch of good books, so here goes! Team Geek 2012 by Brian W. Fitzpatrick and Ben Collins-Sussman Great book about team dynamics and software culture, written by a couple Xooglers and based on learnings from a series of popular presentations [...]

If you look closely at my blogging history, you’ll see that I try and post something about once a month. You might also notice a wee gap from about July through to November this year. Well that can be explained by the new addition to our family, my first son, Will. He is the light [...]

Software quality is important to me. I think about it a lot. I think about it when I’m estimating, when I’m coding and sometimes when I’m at home too. Today I was thinking about software quality on a run and an interesting thing occurred to me, that is when we set a target for quality, [...]

Today I am certificated as Microsoft Certified Solution Developer of Web Applications. That means this morning I took the last of three exams required to earn that qualification. What a stress! I have a Garmin Fenix watch that monitors my heart-rate, and it is interesting that my stress levels are exceptionally high today, and yesterday, [...]