If your reading this blog, and used twitter in the past few days, you have probably already seen this tweet, or some of the replies coming through from the community: 10x engineers Founders if you ever come across this rare breed of engineers, grab them. If you have a 10x engineer as part of your first few engineers, …

Good morning day 3. So much to absorb already from Day 1 and 2 but it isn’t over yet. This morning’s Keynote “Crossing the River by Feeling the Stones” from Simon Wardley is a must see. This was a very educational look at the value of maps, and the importance of knowing the landscape, looking at …

After a restful night at a London hotel (I learned my lesson from the last time I came in for a London conference) coffee and breakfast at the Business Design Centre in London, muCon 2019 kicks off. muCon (or µCon) is a Conference on Microservices, DDD & Software Architecture. From what I gather, this year for the …

Published on April Fools Day, 2019 Microsoft announced today that they are working on Silverlight 6, which is to include .NetStandard support up to at least NetStandard 2.0. Development Manager Loof Lirpa on the Silverlight Development team has confirmed that there is a Silverlight version 6 in the works, and it will …

Have you been to see rock bands perform live? There are a lot of subtleties to their performance that you might not have noticed. And it is relevant to software…

It’s a new year, and we already have a bunch of dotnet releases to look forward to, thanks to the open development processes that Microsoft is using these days with dotnet. The three big releases I am looking forward to are C# 8 and .Net Core 3.0, and a NetStandard2.1. (Not to mention there is a .Net Framework …

In my hand, I have a couple of train tickets. The reservations indicate that I left the house at 5 am Saturday morning to make the first train from Birmingham to Cambridge, and wouldn’t get home again until 9 pm. And that is exactly what I did. I’ve been making more of an effort this year to attend …

There is a small town in the South Island of New Zealand called Milton. The main road runs right through the town in one side and out the other. Its a nice enough place to stop on a road trip. There is a unique feature to this main road in Miton, you see. When you get to the middle of the town and the road has a …

Unlike some unfortunate people who found out on the day and missed out, I had the opportunity to attend the Alt.Net Unconference in Birmingham this Saturday. Now I know some of you think Saturday Conferences are too far outside your work time. But hear me out on this first. This is a free event, which means no …

Day 2 Day 2 of NDC Oslo. A bit less productive than the first. I needed a longer lunch and missed a couple of slots, but made the most of talking to some of the speakers for a bit over the break. There is so much going on that it just felt necessary. Never-the-less, I did still pack in a few good choices throughout the …

With 10 streams on, there has been a lot to choose from at NDC in Oslo. But as day one ends, I’ve now voted with my feet. And since I can’t be in two places at once (though the overflow does technically make this possible) these are the decisions I made, and a few takeaways from each. Day 1 I was pretty …

I recently attended the AWS Summit in London and thought I would give some notes on the event from my perspective. As a developer working for a company that uses AWS, there was plenty to get out of an event such as this, and the free attendance makes a great business case to get the time to go. I really enjoyed the …

I heard a great quote yesterday: You can’t out-exercise a bad diet And this is a great metaphor for technical debt. We all agree that you need to pay down your tech debt in your software. And it’s great to commit to addressing a little technical debt during each sprint. The problem is that this is the …

Well, mostly. I hear the excuse a lot from developers, “Oh, because I am lazy”. This seems to be some sort of way of justifying the way we do some of our development, automation scripts, bash power-user commands like grep and awk, even writing a program to solve something we could do ourselves manually. …

Ok, so I know I am in the minority as a Windows Phone user, but sometimes I just get frustrated and I wish Microsoft at least tried to achieve parity with their platforms, and not leave it to others who just won’t bother. I have a really nice Acer Liquid Jade Primo Windows 10 mobile phone. Continuum, Hexa Core …

My name is Mark and I am a podcast addict. TL;DR I listen to many podcasts. If you want some suggestions for weekly/monthly listening I recommend: Hanselminutes .Net Rocks! Yet Another Podcast Merge Conflict Accidental Tech Podcast The Incomparable And some podcasts that have finished This Developer’s Life (27 …

In 2008 (8 years ago!) I blogged about the art of the brick. I didn’t join twitter until 2010, but if I had this probably wouldn’t have been a blog post, really, since I can fit it in a quote right here: Check out this guy who makes art out of Lego bricks. Very talented and very creative, a must see. His …

The nice thing about git is that branches are cheap and you can create many and varied branches for every little fix, format or feature. The annoying thing about GitHub is that every user creates many many many branches. One of my pet peeves at the moment is a large number of branches on our upstream repository. That …

Some people have a natural gift to be able to learn. They can pick up any subject and by putting in hard work they can get good at it. Some people have a natural interest in a specific subject, and these people enjoy the process of learning and don’t find the work being put in as ‘hard’, but instead it is fun. They too …

Ok, so not that big a leap, it’s just me. Six months later me. Moved to the UK me. I’ve taken the plunge and moved away from Windy Wellington in little old New Zealand to a place in the UK called Milton Keynes. Famous for wide streets, round-a-bouts and concrete cows. Why Milton Keynes? Because Xero has an …