It’s not common that I write an article with such a clickbaity (an admittedly, tacky) title that makes a claim that I so desperately hope turns out to be wrong. But hey, you’re reading this aren’t you 😉 The impetus for the words you’re about to read come from various…

One of the finest books I’ve had the pleasure of reading recently is Designing Data Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann. This book has become renowned for its comprehensive review of distributed systems and its interrogation of the various trade-offs involved in design choices. It took me 3 months to fully…

Think back to just 3 months ago, in December 2019. Looking back it doesn’t even seem real anymore. I remember mulled wine, festive markets, cinnamon lattes, Christmas parties and succulent roast dinners. If you were to go back in time to visit yourself just 12 weeks ago and describe your…

Recently we had a nasty bug occur that wasn’t caught by our test suite. I usually see bugs like this as an opportunity to assess the value of the automated tests. …

A company I’ve been working with lately had a very niche problem; for every confirmation email that they sent out, only 65% of users were clicking on the confirmation link to confirm their accounts. …

All too often we frame technical debt as a purely technical issue; the clue is in the name after all. Technical debt is a term used to describe the burden a software development team takes on when features are rushed through without any design considerations. Technical debt may be incurred…

I recently started fixing a bug that was raised in our user acceptance testing (UAT) phase. Luckily this bug hadn’t reached production, so it was caught in the nick of time. The bug was in the confirmation emails that users were receiving from Salesforce when they went to sign up…