As an architect I am starting to proof of concept a lot of potential solutions to the problems we have at Compare The Market in order to move the business forward.

We are now moving at fast pace towards a micro-service architecture, and some of the issues we have are now are forcing us to make hard and fast decisions, particularly about data

In my humble opinion (and hopefully others too!), a micro-service should be simple and have its own storage. …

To test or not to test — that is a question that has been answered long ago and I wont be going into the pros and cons (there are none)… Just Test.. Please… up Front!! ie .. TDD.. please!

I have lost count of how may times my tests have saved my ass and also how many times I have run tests due to someone saying my code does not do what it should and I prove in 10 seconds that it is. …

I don’t go to many conferences. This is not something that I am steadily avoiding, its just that these things come around and I see the list of subjects and dont feel like they will benefit me or my team at the time. Generally, I seem to be very very busy (note to self… managed time better).

That said, in 2016 my Director asked me to go to MongoEurope 2016 and I initially thought that this would be a good idea as the services we use in my team rely heavily on the beast that is Mongo (for better or…

Balance

What is a good balance within a tech lead role? Is it 50% technical development and 50% line management? or is it 100% technical and sod the rest of it?

I ask as I am currently 1 year into a Tech Lead role for CompareTheMarket and I work with approximately 15 tech leads all of whom have skills and management styles that are individual to them, so the question is, do we fit all these individuals into one box and tell them they have to do 20% of this and 80% of that?

If I look at the ‘Job on…

So… many moons ago in a galaxy far far away (actually London) was mongodb2016 which turned out to be a very informative day for me.

Once I had filled myself with copious amounts of bacon sandwiches (I must thank apenazzi for pointing me in the right direction) I sat at the front of the opening performance and enjoying a rather good talk by Brian Cox about Big Data and scanning the night sky.

Browsing my menu of lectures I spied what I thought would be a very informative lecture about Mongo drivers called ‘Star in a Reasonably Priced Car —…