Director, Product Engineering at TELUS Health. Coding for 15+ years, a TDD advocate, PHP fan, with an interest in Complexity Theory and a History Degree.
We get commitment in product development all wrong! Commitment is a critical aspect of achieving strategic goals.
September 09, 2024Sweden isn’t a country one immediately thinks of when considering the development of computers. However, it has a rich history in the field of computing dating back to the 19th Century.
October 04, 2022Software is to the 21st century what oil was to the 20th century. It is what drives our society forward and makes new opportunities possible.
August 16, 2022One of the first, or most prominent people, to work on a Big Data problem was Herman Hollerith. In the 1880s the US Census Bureau was struggling to process census data in a timely fashion.
June 06, 2022There are two important questions to ask about Charles Babbage, why did he fail to build his mechanical computers? And what can his failures teach computer scientists and businesses today?
May 23, 2022Kateryna Yushchenko studied Mathematics and in the 1950s became involved in the MESM project, the Soviet Union’s first computer.
April 08, 2022One of the great tragedies of any conflict is the damage it does to cultural and historical assets.
March 15, 2022It is well documented Charles Babbage was a difficult, belligerent and often quarrelsome man.
February 16, 2022The period between 1930 and 1960 can be regarded as a dividing line in history. A 30 year period which turned more than 2,000 years of human history on its head.
February 02, 2022Charles Babbage wasn’t remembered as fondly at the time of his death as he is today.
January 18, 2022Konrad Zuse is widely regarded as one of the creators of the modern computer. In 1942 he released the Z3 which was the first digital computer.
January 09, 2022We could start our story with Colossus, influenced by Alan Turing and Max Newman, and built by Tommy Flowers in 1943.
January 03, 2022As software developers working in the 'modern' world it can be difficult for us to grasp how challenging previous generations found certain tasks.
December 09, 2021We cannot consider the origins of computers and software without first considering the origins of mathematics. Without mathematics we couldn’t conceptualise either as it is a foundational pillar of both subjects.
November 25, 2021An important distinction to remember when thinking about complexity is the difference between code and software development. The former is complicated and the later is complex.
November 05, 2021We've known for a long time that stories are deeply flawed, that history often only represents one perspective. Stories are put together after an event using a collection of facts, but never all the facts.
October 29, 2021I've recently been reading The Machine That Changed The World it tells the story of the move from Mass Production to Lean Production. Lean is a precursor to Agile.
October 08, 2021Culture is probably the most important aspect of a development team, get the culture wrong and the team and the work will suffer.
October 01, 2021I've found working at companies with decent people cultures has dramatically improved my wellbeing.
September 21, 2021In software development complexity itself is an emergent property of code. At some point in the development process software crosses the boundary between simple and complex.
July 17, 2020This post aims to show you how to begin to write tests in Deno, and provides an honest appraisal of Deno's test tools so you are aware of current pitfalls.
June 13, 2020There are some great, free design tools online which are very helpful and I thought I'd make a quick note of a few of them.
May 27, 2020Code Analysis allows you to generate lots of metrics and information which help you improve your code and prove it's quality.
May 13, 2020Code Isolation is a relatively simple concept, it just means one piece of code should not know about or affect any other piece of code.
May 11, 2020Tests are one of the most important ways to prove your code works, they enable observability and provide a guarantee code will work as expected.
May 08, 2020A few social media tools which are useful when building a website.
April 30, 2020Good documentation helps other developers navigate code and implement it in their projects.
April 23, 2020Code maintainability is a fundamental part good of software development. It is important because as code becomes less maintainable the cost to maintain the code increases.
March 26, 2020These are just the questions for the code maintainability test I created.
March 26, 2020To add a GitHub Actions badge to your project just use the following markdown.
March 20, 2020The easiest way to add JWT authorisation to Slim PHP is via the library PSR-JWT
March 13, 2020One question I believe software developers need to ask themselves more often is, Can I prove this code works?
March 04, 2020I started the Fakers App in 2012 as a side project to help some journalists researching people who were buying fake followers on Twitter.
February 28, 2020WP_Mock is an extension of PHPUnit which makes WordPress specific testing functionality available.
August 07, 2019Dusty is a WordPress starter repository, and it comes with a Composer and Docker integration out of the box.
July 20, 2019I recently appeared on Peter Fisher's How to Code Well podcast to discuss Test to Break Principles and Test Driven Development.
May 27, 2019Back in 2012 when I was running my own business I wrote a followers analytics algorithm for Twitter.
May 05, 2019I feel like it is an appropriate moment for me to reflect and share some of my learnings from the past ten years of work.
May 02, 2019This is my talk on Test Driven Development and Test to Break Principles at PHP UK 2019.
March 25, 2019Every software development task has a minimum cost which covers the creation of code that functions well and is bug free.
March 15, 2019There are three different test types, unit, integration and functional, and they can all be run using PHPUnit.
March 11, 2019To coincide with the deprecation of PHP 7.0 and the release of PHP 7.3 I have been working on version 2.0.0 of my Really Simple JSON Web Token library.
December 14, 2018A Requirements, Rules and Examples spreadsheet helps a team understand complexity, write better tests and improves transparency.
November 28, 2018You can't install Docker for Windows and access it directly from WSL in your Ubuntu terminal.
November 07, 2018When you run a developer test or assessment you are not checking to see 'if' someone can write code and solve a problem.
October 26, 2018There are three laws which Bob Martin believes we should follow if we're doing test driven development.
October 24, 2018Without good management, planning and process it is simply not possible to write good code and produce great products which is what all developers want to do.
August 01, 2018In PHP ternaries break down when you insert them in string concatenation code.
June 25, 2018There are two important caveats to the type declarations introduced in PHP 7 that developers should be aware of.
April 20, 2018To become a tech manager and learn how to be good at it is difficult. There isn't a great deal of 'documentation' available and developers don't discuss the topic a lot.
March 12, 2018Security is a topic that is often poorly understood by developers because many of them focus on the technical side of security rather than the wider topic
February 20, 2018If you'd like to build your own JSON Web Token generator or just learn a little bit more about the inner workings of JSON Web Tokens the following guide will help.
January 29, 2018When building an application and writing code there are two types of test you can run to check everything works, test to work and test to break.
January 15, 2018Writing unit tests with PHPUnit is a great way to improve your code and your applications, learn how to set it up from scratch.
January 04, 2018Ever since Scotch Box released version 3.0 they've had an issue with the PHP-XML module not being installed on the Vagrant box.
December 11, 2017Behat is a PHP version of the well known testing tool Cucumber and it follows Behaviour Driven Development principles along with the Gherkin syntax.
November 22, 2017This post aims to explain how to setup automated functional UI tests in Behat using Selenium and Chrome on an Ubuntu environment.
November 22, 2017On a basic level machine learning involves lots and lots of data and what is called a 'model'
October 07, 2017While many junior PHP developers struggle to write and learn basic code many seniors spend their time arguing and bickering.
September 26, 2017The roots of automation took hold in 18th century Britain and then expanded across Europe and America
September 12, 2017Fableau is a Tableau Web Data Connector for the Facebook Graph API which I've now released the Alpha version for.
September 04, 2017Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are two industry buzz words that we're hearing more and more of at the moment.
August 24, 2017I decided to explain what the basic development roles are and I came up with the development cave
August 15, 2017There is a great deal of fear and misunderstanding surrounding code reviews.
August 13, 2017I recently went on a weekend break to Prague and decided not to take my laptop with me.
August 01, 2017Very few people like code tests, particularly developers, and especially in interviews
July 22, 2017