csMACnz

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……

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…

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.…

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…

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…

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…

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.…

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…