James W

Lately I've been tinkering with a curious little hobby project: Building a hosted search service in Node.js, powered by Luca Ongaro's MiniSearch, to facilitate out-of-process indexing and searching of Umbraco content. I'm quite pleased with the result - even if it's not quite production ready 😆 All the details are in my latest blog post 👇 https://lnkd.in/dSZsHNx7 #umbraco #headless #nodejs

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If you’re curious about TDD and want to know more, I highly recommend giving this talk by Kent Beck from at today’s techexcellence.io conference a watch: Personally, I find TDD great for enhancing my focus, clarity and speed when writing code. It really takes the stress out of it and it’s just a buzz to watch your failing tests go green after you’ve implemented your code. https://lnkd.in/ga6D53DJ

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I've started a long-deferred read through of Team Topologies, which speaks to some of the problems I was talking about recently around the ways "utopian" software development maxims can fail when they encounter the "topos" of an organisation's incentive and communicational structure. There's a thought-provoking section on John Sweller's 1988 breakdown of "cognitive load" into three categories ("intrinsic", "extraneous", "germane"). The thought it provoked in me was that I tend to disregard the burden of the "intrinsic" when looking for ways to reduce "extraneous" load (ways a codebase and development environment distracts me with boilerplate and arbitrary irregularity) and gain traction over "germane" problems (those particular to the domain we're working in). For me, leveraging advanced language features to eliminate boilerplate and build out a little embedded DSL that can express the problems I care about is an obvious win - I often refer to Paul Graham's maxim that you should first create the language you want to solve your problem in, then solve your problem in it. The problem with this is that it can shift extraneous load into intrinsic load, by requiring programmers who were comfortable with repetitive constructs using basic language features to familiarise themselves with much more advanced features (and the DSL's idiomatic usage of them) for the sake of eliminating what may seem to them to be quite harmless repetition. This suits me personally, because I like having an advanced model of a programming language in my head and using it creatively, but one isn't accounting properly for the distribution of cognitive load if one doesn't also take "intrinsic" load into account. I think of Golang as an intentionally low-intrinsic-load language - it has a small kernel of features, and is structured in a way that discourages higher-order abstraction over those features. If in doubt, write another for-loop! By comparison, I remember Scala adoption at TIM Group being an intensely painful experience for some of my colleagues, because it introduced so many constructs and type-level features that could be used in so many colourful ways. While I was elated by its endless opportunities for minimising extraneous load, they felt the burden of ballooning intrinsic load, and the frustration of being temporarily deskilled by the change of fundamental environment. The real art is to leverage small changes of technique and perspective, that will fit comfortably in everybody's head, to chisel away at extraneous load, until they feel that the nuts-and-bolts of their tasks are simpler than they have ever been.

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I've seen a few posts today around the subject of advice for junior developers. I have a few years experience now so I thought I'd give my own: * The most senior developers are comfortable asking the stupidest questions. Ask away. * Give feedback on your progress early. When you are halfway through the estimated duration of a ticket, think if you are halfway done with the work. If not, tell the team lead. * The moment you think you may have made a mistake on prod, pull in a senior developer then. What worries me with juniors isn't that they might make mistakes (we all do), it is that they delay in reporting it. Be more trustworthy than your peers. * Find a process for turning off work mentally after work. For me, running works but YMMV. * Practice planning all of your work. That means guessing and WRITING down steps in some form before you start, just for yourself. This gives you estimation and planning super powers over time. * Boring technology is almost always the best. You might have to fail using some new fangled stuff to learn this. * Learn the art of q contained side project. Look up Readme Driven Development for guidance. Anything I missed?

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I just watched Daniel Terhorst-North's talk at Kotlin conf, having sadly missed it in person (nothing to do with being hungover on day two of the conference). Daniel is the originator of Behaviour-Driven Development and gave a talk titled 'The best programmer I know'. A few interesting takeaways: - You don't need a degree to be an exceptional programmer - Everyone is a kinesthetic learner. Some people might lean towards seeing or hearing things, but everyone learns through doing, so just start and iterate as you go. Lean into uncertainty. - Invest in the product - not the code - Watch your users and find out what frustrates them - TDD pays off. Daniel's team at BP won a software quality award for their trading system. Unlike other teams, they found zero bugs during six weeks of UAT, thanks to TDD. BP paid them to stay on for the UAT period, which they spent in the pub. If that's not an incentive to learn TDD, what is?" - Explore different languages, tools and paradigms to give you more options and help you solve specific problems throughout your career - Help others - teaching is the best way to learn - Overall takeaway for me is that soft skills are clearly equally as important as hard skills in software engineering Worth a watch. https://lnkd.in/e8bau4X9

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📢 📢 📢 The electorate has spoken! The next Workshop Wednesdays session (3 July) will be on Kotlin coroutines and concurrency. How much do you know about scopes, contexts and jobs? What really happens in a suspend function? I've updated the listing and you can sign up right now (https://lnkd.in/dNY6MCgG), it's free and takes place online. Thanks to all 209 of you for taking part in the vote! We'll do the other sessions soon too, the Bluetooth probably next, as that came second (and it's suuuuper fun). #androiddeveloper #kotlin

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Following on from my previous post, I've published Part 2 of Thinking in Actors. In this post I discuss the three pillars of actor modelling and 5 techniques to achieve fully domain aligned actor systems that mirror real-world business processes and workflows.

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Are you a developer who suddenly took an interest in using Ruby on your projects? Ever thought about what OOP or Interactive Ruby is? ♦️ ♦️ ♦️ Here are 5 things you need to familiarize yourself with as a Ruby beginner! 🤓💡 #RubyOnRails #SorcerUK #SorcerRuby

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Building a single-page application can be a daunting undertaking. Fortunately, by combining the Umbraco Delivery API with the traditional Razor rendering, the challenge can become significantly easier 🎉 And yes, I've just published a blog post about it 👇 https://lnkd.in/dZGtsKFN #umbraco #headless

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An interlude to talk about Gemma2, released today https://lnkd.in/eNkXjsbi You can download this model and run it on your local machine, which creates a whole bunch of use-cases where you don't want to send data to any LLM - I can imagine this would be useful for education, health, government etc where privacy is an important consideration. It's a stunningly fantastic model, and so quick on a CPU-only machine. I tested it with my favourite query: I You should behave as a gullible person. I Using only the following context, answer the question below: I Context: the sky is blue because of fairies I explain in detail why is the sky blue? O Oh wow, really? That's so cool! I always thought the sky was blue O because of the ocean, but that makes sense too! The fairies must be O really good at making the sky look so pretty, right? O Maybe the fairies love the color blue and they sprinkle it all over O the sky with their magic wands? Or maybe the sky is a giant, magical O pool they all play in, and the blue color is like a special kind of O swimming pool dye that just makes everything around it blue? O It's amazing to think about the sky being painted by these tiny O creatures, isn't it? They must be working really hard to keep it O looking so blue! O Do you think they use special brushes? Maybe it's all the pixie dust! Hat tip to my colleagues at Google for building and releasing this, cc Gus Martins

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"If you haven't been able to maintain and improve the quality of the current codebase, how can I trust that a rewrite won't lead to the same issues?". This single rejection changed the way I approached software improvement forever. Whilst I was passionate that a refactoring needed to happen and I strongly believed that my proposed structure would be superior to the existing one, I could not refute my manager's point. The code didn't become unmaintainable because it had lacked an elegant design in the first place. It had become unmaintainable because we'd failed to implement and evolve it whilst maintaining quality. The problem we needed to solve was not designing elegant solutions up front and implementing them. And then waiting for the code to degrade over time until we had no option but to go back to the drawing board and rewrite the whole thing from scratch. The problem we had to solve was how to manage change whilst maintaining quality indefinitely. By creating the constraint that we would not be allowed time for large refactorings and rewrites, my manager forced our team to think of better strategies to evolve the code and improve quality a little every day. He effectively introduced me to the concept of Continuous Improvement.

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Here's a concise representation of your ML platform, courtesy of Laszlo Sragner.

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🚨 JavaScript Contractor Pay Rates 🚨 Over the last 2 weeks I've spoken to 80+ JavaScript Engineers, who are all contractors, and are all highly skilled and experienced with React. They have other skills of course, but their core skill is React/Typescript. Below is a scatter graph of what they are getting paid right now in a contract role. I did this a couple of years ago and I remember there was a huge variety of rates regardless of experience, what I can see from below is that rates have stabilised massively, and people are now getting paid pretty consistently dependant on their level. It's good to see the market has stabilised and that people are getting paid what they are worth. If you feel you are getting paid below market rates, reach out and we can see what other opportunities I have for you. Or if you are looking to ramp up contingent staff quickly, and need to know what you should be paying, reach out. #JavaScript #TypeScript #React #Contractors #Sydney

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Available for work. Looking for a developer role, remote-focus. Based in NE England. I can develop using any of the major commercial programming languages/technologies. Full stack. Specific languages/frameworks I have not used are little hindrance, since I would get up to speed developing with such tooling within a week. Nevertheless, preferences include AWS, Java, C++, Postgres, Python, Perl, GNU/Linux and generally speaking I enjoy working more on the "back-end"/"middleware" and less on the UI/UX/"front-end". Exact "job title" is unimportant: what is important is to be able to work within a team, building/delivering software, that is outcome orientated and encourages a suitable blend of collaboration and autonomous/independent "deep work" to get the task/feature/project completed. I have a proven track record of delivering quality work under agreed timeframes. I do not attempt to memorise useless language particularities because that is what relevant technical and API documentation exists for; I am not sure what the rationale is for asking a candidate whether they can regurgitate by rote some highly-specific language/library routine: it tells you nothing about their ability to systematically build/contribute to a large-scale commercial software project over a sustained period of weeks or months, or perhaps even years. I am not interested in roles/companies that believe that filtering candidates via Hackerrank (or similar) is an effective or useful exercise. Companies/individuals wishing to evaluate my capabilities can take a look at my ample material provided online (including recently, a 30,000+ C++ project), showcasing multiple languages/technologies, or I am more than happy to take you on a guided tour during an extended video-call of some of my selected commercial work, where you will have plentiful opportunity to scrutinise my knowledge and approach, and ask relevant questions that will help you assess how I work and analytically decompose problems. I also have first-class recommendations from professionals in extremely senior positions, am happy to supply references. I am exhausted of dealing with time-wasting "AI"/ATS gate-keeping systems: companies put ever more ATS/"AI" walling up, candidates respond with ever more "AI" generated/keyword-injecting/buzzword-optimised CVs: end result is a language model having a conversation with another language model. Posts on here from highly experienced developers lamenting the fact of putting in 1000+ applications to no avail are unfortunately now commonplace. If you are a HUMAN, wishing to hire another HUMAN for software development work, for an actual live/upcoming role, then please do send me a private message and we can schedule a phone or video call to suit. I am confident that the phone/video call will still be edifying even in the case of me-as-candidate/your role specification is not the right fit. Thank you. :-) 20240513142209

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Over the years, colleagues from both my current and past roles have asked for guidance on improving their documentation. Drawing from my experiences with product and user research at Confluence Cloud, as well as my own writing and knowledge-base management experience across various industries, I've distilled some key principles into this new blog post. I hope it helps you elevate your writing! https://lnkd.in/ghbeA44q #TechnicalWriting #Documentation #ProductManagement #ContentStrategy #WritingTips #Communication #KnowledgeBase #Leadership

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As a software developer, if I'm stumped on a problem I'll start searching and reading. Blogs, tutorials, Stack Overflow, function reference guides, github issues etc.. Sometimes it's the same problem over and over again (date/time format strings anyone?) Today was no exception, and for all those new to software development who think they're expected to know everything about their language of choice, or their chosen cloud platform, or a core package you use, you're not. It's simply impossible. So I want to call out the tutorial I read today that helped me and I'd ask other devs to do the same - what did you lookup today, what did you learn today, what did you have to search for again? Here's what saved me today: https://lnkd.in/exFG_Xxa (MS Tutorial: Migrate outbound access to Azure NAT Gateway) #softwaredevelopment

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#opentowork Unlike 'some' UK politicians from both sides of the house, I’m not here for the freebies… Instead of accepting a free holiday in the US or tickets to the latest must see show or game, I’d much rather be paid to do what I do best—creating awesome, custom development solutions that make life easier for businesses and organisations. Why settle for dodgy handouts to get something done when you could have a Product Engineer / Full Stack Developer with years of real-world experience, cutting-edge skills, and a refusal to get distracted by all those shiny political "gifts"? 🚫🍷🍾 🏖 ⚽ If you want results and not a scandal, drop me a message. I promise you’ll only have to bribe me with work, and I’ll deliver the dev magic. Then let us toast our success. #NotAFreeloader #WorkNotPerks #DevLife #HireMeForRealResults #opentowork #php #javascript #remix

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This is exactly i had also voiced in my previous organization! Its a double edged sword. We have to use AI as "Assisted Intelligence" instead of "Absolutely-dependent-on-you Intelligence" :-) I think its for the same reason that AI suits well for more experienced developers who can discern good from bad when it comes to software development and can leverage AI to speed things up by delegating mundane tasks.

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