The Complexity Scales
I do not know about you but when I write software I get excited about all the possible things I can do to solve the problem I am currently looking at. Personally I find it easy to get carried away with all the clever things I can do with various methodologies and software patterns and […]
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 […]
Whats the Meta in WordPress
Often when tutorials cover the how of doing a task they do not cover the why. And sometimes you need to understand what problem a feature solves so you can understand where to apply it. If you have ever looked at the WordPress API or at the WordPress table structure you will find three tables […]
The Help Helper
So in part one of this two part series I covered how to integrate help documentation for your plugin into WordPress using the built in WordPress functions. But if you write a lot of plugins, or plan to, then it might be a good idea to create a class which encapsulates some of this functionality. […]
On Technical Debt and Craftsmanship
Technical debt is something we, as developers, live with every day. Sometimes a pragmatic solution needs to take precedence over a perfect solution. A software craftsmanship purist would argue that you should always strive for the perfect solution but in my opinion this is not always practical.
The No Route Back SatNav Software Update
Allowing the user to revert a version of software to a previous version is an essential part of maintainable software development and deployment. Even if this is an uninstall and a re-install of an older version. In my experience every system is unique and when software is deployed you can never guarantee 100% install success.
Why I will Always Try And Find A Ready-Built Library
No matter how good your code is, there will always be parts which do not work as well as you want. These are sometimes called bugs. There are also times when we think building something ourselves will be more cost effective, if for no other reason than we simply know the code better.
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 […]
Agile Decompiled : Incremental And Iterative Releases
One of the hallmarks of an agile process is the use of iterative and incremental releases. Proponents of the Waterfall Model suggest that by doing all the design up front and making sure that each part of the process is correct before moving onto the next part, means that bugs are found sooner and therefore […]
Agile Decompiled : Kanban
Now Kanban is not something I have practiced but for completeness of this series I wanted to write an article on it. So I have spent the last few weeks reading about what is Kanban and is it agile. So what is this Kanban thing anyway? Kanban is like Scrum in that it can be […]
