We spend plenty of time as engineers either being onboarded into a new organisation / project or helping onboard others. The best onboarding experiences I've had have been low-stress, with a clear pat…

Love Jira. The main method of ensuring the team builds the right thing at the right time is a quality & well ordered backlog. The team owns the stories and tickets. The tickets are just a tool fo…

My personal experience of coding with AI has not yet lived up to the promises and hype I am seeing online. While the initial contact with LLM code generation was certainly impressive, and I would not …

🎙️ Listen to the podcast episode here 🎙️ I was reading some code recently that had a bunch of problems at various layers, and in spite of all my years of coding and the fact that it's not even my projec…

I've been using git for nearly two decades now and yet I still seem to find new challenges and new things to learn on a regular basis. One of things that makes me scratch my head more than I would lik…

Mainlining Some very experienced developers, some of whom I've heard it from in-person, strongly advocate what is often called "mainline" or "trunk-based" development, meaning that the git history is …

It might seem a bit odd to write a post on software tests after so many years and so much content, yet to this day I see well meaning developers writing software without adequate test coverage. In fac…

Hexagonal Architecture? Uh... what? I'd largely ignored hexagonal architecture thus far in my career. I'd heard of it at some point. Read a bit about it and not really grokked it. I talked to some peo…

Having lived in the world of technology for two to three decades now, I've come to a fundamental truth: text formats are the ultimate format. "text formats are the ultimate format" ~ Me, just now It…

An argument (lol) for the use of explicit argument names in C# function calls even when they seem redundant. You can assert correctness when reviewing the call site in a dumb text display (e.g. a pat…

Learn to code... then get endlessly better at coding... Be good at coding. The end. ... but wait, there's more. There is truly endless training available for getting better at the craft of being a d…

Reasons you should prefer a single class / interface / record / enum / struct per file in C# projects. Congitive load Multiple types per file increases the cognitive overhead of remembering where ever…

Here's my take on what it means to be a dev-lead / tech-lead / lead developer; and why it's time I stepped up. I'm going to explain what I think makes for a really good high-functioning dev team, and …

Not to be confused with git rebase and the ability to squash commits locally with interactive rebase, which is a whole other flamewar. This post is predicated on giving a crap about the git history y…

Sometimes a codebase has an overwhelming amount of "terrible" stuff that as a developer you almost can't help but just diving in and fixing it. Doing this without thinking too hard can result in many …

You have a "feature branch" in git that you've been working on for a while but now main or master has moved on. You know of merge and rebase, but which one should you use? And what can you do to avoi…

Small matter of code style that I keep coming across. Whether to write if (thing) Action(); or if (thing) Action(); or if (thing) { Action(); } We should always use the braces to avoid introducing …

Why you should care about writing good commit messages It is extremely likely you won't be the last person to touch this code. You will forget the details of exactly why you did something after a few…