Oil. For richer, for poorer, for better, for worse, in sickness and in health, until death do us part. Oil is the Marmite of the technological age. Governments love it, Environmentalists hate it; it’s big business that at face value appears to make the rich richer and the poor poorer; one that caters for today at the expense of tomorrow; one that invests in people at the expense of the environment.… Read More

In any company where one or more key products are under constant, active development by multiple disparate teams, there is a real risk that sooner or later the code-base will diverge and it will become impossible to ever bring it back together.… Read More

Earlier this week a question was posed to myself and a colleague which encapsulated one of the core understandings of my journey within Software Engineering. I may have mentioned before that when I first left school I spent 5 years training and working as a mechanical engineer, specialising in the design and installation of heating and ventillation systems in schools, hospitals, shopping centres and other commercial buildings around the Lancashire and Greater Manchester area where I grew up.… Read More

Following on from my post a few weeks ago about feature driven development in this post I am going to discuss with you the 4 genres of projects. In literature there are primarily 4 genres of books. Crime, Romance, Sci-Fi & fantasy and horror and just like the concept of a novel can apply to a single project, these genres apply to software projects in general.… Read More

We’ve all seen it. We have all faced the horror of crap code. In this post I am going to give the basic pointers for avoiding having your code thrown back at you with a bright red FAIL mark all over it.… Read More