Whenever I have used the GOV.UK Prototype Kit to build a prototype I have always hosted it on Heroku. The main reason for doing this was because it was just so easy (I wrote a post about just how easy it was many years ago), it was also the default approach - until recently. ...
Decisions are made all of the time when developing software. Some decisions are small and easy to change such as the name of a variable or whether to extract some code into a separate class/function/module. Other decisions are larger and more difficult to change such as which test framework to use, whether to use JSON or XML or if a NoSQL database should be used in favour of a SQL database, etc. ...
Over the years I’ve tried to keep a record of what I’ve done in some form or other. I’ve experimented with week notes (effectively a summary of what you did over the past week that you might make public, or just keep private). ...
Teams often have a daily catch-up, often referred to as a stand-up, where an update is provided by each member of the team. The standard approach to the daily updates is a 15 minute meeting where participants answer three questions: ...
When asking for a review of a pull request (PR) ensure there is suitable context provided to the reviewer(s). ...
A common architectural style (at the time of writing) is to split up applications into many, smaller, more focussed applications. Frequently this style is known by the term microservices. When working with microservices I’ve rarely had the need to run, and actually use, more than a single web application concurrently in my development environment. ...
Following on from the post about development practices and principles I wanted to capture principles more related to general ways of thinking and working. As before, this isn’t in any particular order. ...
During my time working in software development I’ve picked up a few guiding principles I try to consistently follow. Some of them have always been the way I’ve tried to work and others have been adopted after having been burnt by not using it in the first place or learning better ways of doing and thinking about things. ...
I watched When To Use Microservices (And When Not to!) soon after it was published but never got round to publishing this post, which I wrote at the same time but have edited more recently so I could publish it. The post contains some thoughts I had about the video and thought it would be worth capturing them and maybe try to get back into blogging at some regular interval, although clearly that didn’t happen at the time… ...
GitHub is a pretty decent cloud based Git repository. I would put it in my top 2 along with GitLab. ...