Introduction On Thursday (July 4th, 2024) the UK held a general election. There are many, many blog posts, newspaper articles, podcast episodes etc covering the politics of it, and the lessons that the various political parties may need to learn. I, on the other hand, learned very different lessons on the night of the 4th … Continue reading Lessons from…
#general
27 posts
9 Jul 2024
30 Oct 2022
This morning (October 30th 2022), the clocks went back in the UK – the time that would have been 2am fell back to 1am. This is just the regular “fall back” transition – there’s nothing special about it. As it happens, I’d driven my electric car for quite a long journey yesterday, so I had … Continue reading Handling times…
12 Jul 2021
Emily Hou talks about her transition from an individual contributor to an engineering manager at Clever. The post Lessons learned: My first year transitioning from an engineer to a manager appeared first on Clever Engineering Blog.
29 Aug 2020
History I started blogging back in 2005, shortly before attending the only MVP summit I’ve managed to go to. I hosted the blog on msmvps.com, back when that was a thing. In 2014 I migrated to wordpress.com, in the hope that this would make everything nice and simple: it’s a managed service, dedicated to blogging, … Continue reading Posting to…
19 Jul 2020
This is a blog post rather than a bug report, partly because I really don’t know what’s at fault. Others with more knowledge of how the console works in .NET Core, or exactly what the Travis log does, might be able to dig deeper. TL;DR: If you’re running jobs using .NET Core 3.1 on Travis … Continue reading Travis logs…
16 Oct 2019
When building systems for new products, there’s a delicate balance between writing code that works and writing code that lasts. A common anti-pattern is preemptively optimizing systems for the future while still trying to find product market fit. For new product teams, this can be a costly mistake as it leads to a slower iterative […] The post Evolving Systems…
12 Oct 2019
Update: I don’t know whether it was partially due to this blog post or not, but AppVeyor has fixed things so that you don’t (currently, 20th October 2019) need to use the fix in this post. You may want to include it anyway, for the sake of future-proofing. TL;DR: If your AppVeyor build starts breaking … Continue reading Using “git…
27 Mar 2019
Note: this is a pretty long post. If you’re not interested in the details, the conclusion at the bottom is intended to be read in a standalone fashion. There’s also a related blog post by Lau Taarnskov – if you find this one difficult to read for whatever reason, maybe give that a try. When … Continue reading Storing UTC…
19 Apr 2018
For data engineers and analysts, it’s pretty common to get questions about missing or incorrect data. “Hey Data Engineer, there’s an issue with the data – I expect numbers at least 20% higher than what our reporting tools show. Can you take a look?” If you’ve ever been responsible for a Business Intelligence pipeline, you’ve […] The post Save sanity…
28 Nov 2017
For a while, I’ve been considering how useful nuget.org statistics are. I know there have been issues in the past around accuracy, but that’s not what I’m thinking about. I’ve been trying to work out what the numbers mean at all and whether that’s useful. I’ve pretty sure an older version of the nuget.org gallery … Continue reading NuGet package…
6 Sept 2017
At Clever, we chose early on to deliberately define the key principles we wanted our culture to reflect. These tenets are a part of day-to-day vocabulary, and we think they make us a stronger team. About a year ago, we asked ourselves: how do these tenets apply to our engineering team? Are there aspects of […] The post Defining Clever’s…
25 Jun 2017
9 days ago, I posted Imposter Syndrome (part 1) and then immediately listened to Heather Downing‘s excellent NDC talk on the topic. This is the “reflections afterwards” post I’d expected to write (although slightly more delayed than I’d hoped for). I’m not going to try to recap Heather’s talk, because that wouldn’t do justice to … Continue reading Imposter Syndrome…
16 Jun 2017
Note: this is a purely personal post. It has no code in. It’s related to the coding side of my world more than the rest of who I am, so it’s in my coding blog, but if you’re looking for code, just move on. As part of a Twitter exchange, I discovered that Heather Downing … Continue reading Imposter syndrome…
10 Dec 2016
Background I’m in the privileged position of receiving more invitations to speak (at conferences, user groups and podcasts) than I can realistically agree to. I’ve decided to start applying some new criteria to how I pick which ones I go to1. However, over the last couple of years as feminism has become an increasingly important … Continue reading Diversity and…
9 Jun 2016
I’ve been following the progress of .NET Core with a lot of interest, and trying to make the Noda Time master branch keep up with it. The aim is that when Noda Time 2.0 eventually ships (apologies for the delays…) it will be compatible with .NET Core from the start. (I’d expected to be able … Continue reading Tracking down…
5 May 2015
There are many, many questions on Stack Overflow about both parsing and formatting date/time values. (I use the term “date/time” to mean pretty much “any type of chronlogical information” – dates, times of day, instants in time etc.) Given how often the same kinds of mistakes are made, I thought it would be handy to … Continue reading Common mistakes…
2 Mar 2015
I’ve been getting a bit cross about backward compatibility recently. This post contains two examples of backward incompatibilities in .NET 4.6, and one example of broken code which isn’t being fixed due for backward compatibility reasons. Let me start off by saying this post is not meant to be seen as an attack on Microsoft. … Continue reading Backward compatibility…
25 Jul 2014
As some of you have noticed (and let me know), my old blog hosting provider recently moved off Community Server to WordPress. I figured that as all the links we being broken anyway, now would be a good time to move off msmvps.com anyway. The old posts are still there, but my blog’s new home … Continue reading New blog…
6 Jun 2014
At Clever we’re building a way for students and teachers to start using learning applications with a click of a button. This is incredibly difficult to do in a school environment, because existing infrastructure is typically incompatible with a world where students use software on the internet. The backbone of the infrastructure at most schools […] The post Engineering at…
30 Jan 2014
I was recently directed to an article on "tiny types" – an approach to static typing which introduces distinct types for the sake of code clarity, rather than to add particular behaviour to each type. As I understand it, they’re like type aliases with no conversions between the various types. (Unlike plain aliases, an object … Continue reading How many…
20 Jan 2014
I see a lot of problems which look somewhat different at first glance, but all have the same cause: Text is losing “special characters” when I transfer it from one computer to another Decryption ends up with garbage Compressed data can’t be decompressed I can transfer text but not binary data These are all cases … Continue reading Diagnosing issues…
21 Sept 2013
It feels a little odd even to write this post, but I receive quite a few emails asking me for advice on how to get better at programming, how to get through interviews, whether it’s better to be a generalist or a specialist etc. I want to make it very clear right from the start, … Continue reading Career and…
21 Jun 2013
This year before NDC, I wrote an article for the conference edition of "The Developer" magazine. Follow that link to find the article in all its illustrated glory (along with many other fine articles, of course) – or read on for just the text. Back when I used to post on newsgroups I would frequently … Continue reading But what…
18 Apr 2013
A little while ago I was contacted about a new merge tool from the company behind PlasticSCM. (I haven’t used Plastic myself, but I’d heard of it.) My initial reaction was that I wasn’t interested in anything which required me to learn yet another source control system, but SemanticMerge is independent of PlasticSCM. My interested … Continue reading New tool…
22 Mar 2012
Hello! Here I am again. Today I will talk about a LESS CSS App for Linux OS. I use both Mac and Linux machines. Using Mac we have the excellent app http://incident57.com/less/. For Linux, we have a executable file (SH commands) that wait for file update and run the lessc command to compile the less … Continue reading LESS CSS…
10 Jul 2011
Boa tarde, pessoal. Me perguntaram por que comecei a blogar em Inglês e não em Português? Temos vários motivos pra isso. O primeiro deles é o fato de saber que tenho MUITO que melhorar no inglês, e sei ainda que o contato diário com a língua é fundamental pra isso. Portanto, blogar em inglês me … Continue reading Inglês? Por…
16 Jun 2011
Olá pessoal. É meu primeiro post no blog. Depois de alguns anos me rendendo à tentação (por falta de tempo), mas sabendo de sua importância, me rendi aos encantos do WordPress e fiz um blog, simples, que espero que sirva de referência para pessoas assim como eu, que todo dia recorre ao Google para tirar … Continue reading Primeiro post…