The Single Point Of Failure
As a SOHO Developer one of the many challenges is the fact that there is no one else to discuss code changes with. This is a bigger deal than it sounds as I, for one, am a great believer that two minds are better than one. If you are unsure of the best way to […]
From Developer To Businessman : A New Venture
For many years I have wanted to go freelance but there has never seemed to be a good time. I’m sure you know how it is. As a dad of three children and a wife and home to support going freelance always seemed too much of a risk. However it is something I had been […]
SOHO Agile : Is agile relevant to the SOHO developer?
Agile is often seen as a team process, and certainly agile lends itself to team activities. So can you apply agile to the Sole Home Office developer? There are some practices which are obviously more difficult if you work by yourself, for example performing a code review could be tricky. But there are other agile […]
Code Reviews Are A Luxury So Cherish Them
Software developers, in my experience, tend to be of a certain type. Often a bit pedantic and with a tendency to stick with doing a task the same way. It’s a hazard of the job. When every detail, even the smallest semi-colon (and in some languages whitespace) can make a big difference. For a SOHO […]
Everybody Fails Sometimes.
Everybody makes mistakes, otherwise we would all write bug free code. For most of us a mistake can be fixed and doesn’t have too serious consequences. When I first released the Pico Plugin Framework, to make sure that the framework doesn’t clash with itself I enclosed the class definition in an if statement
Versioning Plugin Classes – Part 1
If you release more than one plugin then there is a good chance you will build up a set of standard functions which you use in all your plugins. However if a bug turns up in one of your standard plugins you need to be able to release the fix, without breaking the other plugins […]
Don’t Be Afraid Of The Big Bad Techical Debt
A few weeks back I was discussing the architecture of a code module with a friend of mine. The module was one we had inherited from some other development team, it had mould growing on it and really looked like it needed putting down. However, we had just had a request for a new feature […]
Primary And Secondary Audiences
There are many things I find strange about software development, and software developers. One of the things I find strange is that it can be easy to forget who you are writing the software for, and end up creating a work of art at the code level but create something that is actually unusable, or […]
The Sole Home Developer
Today I think I will start a new acronym. I do feel that we do not already have enough acronyms in the programming world so I think I need to add a new one. The SOHO developer. Now this isn’t refering to software developers who work in a particular part of London. Or to Small […]
