I Learnt

VS Code for any Github repository

April 18, 2023

I came across this tweet and had to try it.

Fix default Android emulator not showing in Visual Studio 2022

December 15, 2022

I am working on a Maui application in my spare time and Visual Studio has this annoying habit of not showing the default Android emulator when I load the project. I could go through the hassle of creating a new emulator each time but that is painful and slow.

Reducing Build Size

October 5, 2022

I have been developing a Maui application as a side project and on the whole it has been a fun process. It is still very buggy and there are some pain points however it seems to work. One aspect I haven’t liked is the size of the build artefacts - they are huge if you have multiple projects.

When your WPF menu alignment is wrong

July 7, 2020

I had a very weird problem where my menus on a WPF application were dropping down to the left instead of the normal to the right.

Lazy programmers can be the most productive

April 12, 2019

There is often a work culture that you should be busy all the time - if you are a programmer you should always be typing and producing code. Programming is a mental process and so requires thinking. Sometimes a little thought upfront saves a lot of pain and work down the line.

Technical debt is like Tetris

March 28, 2019

This article uses a really neat analogy with Tetris for illustrating the impact of technical debt. Leaving gaps is akin to leaving technical debt in the code base and makes subsequent changes more difficult or slower to ship.

The value of throwing code away

February 7, 2019

We had a discussion at work about “throw away” code. One of our developers was very against developing any code that would be thrown away afterwards. He referred to this as a waste. In my view sometimes the biggest gain can be in developing code that is meant to be thrown away. It can be used to try things and, more importantly, learn things that can shape the code that is kept. This article sums it up much more eloquently than I can.

Scala + Sbt + Docker quickly

July 20, 2018

I am currently starting to learn Scala (to add to a myriad of other languages I have programmed in over my career). We are also in the process of “dockerizing” our application. So I wanted to try for myself getting a simple Scala application running in Docker.

Abandoning the baggage of Agile

July 13, 2018

I have worked with various flavours of “Agile” over numerous years. These have ranged from the very formal where everything is done by the book to more ad-hoc versions where different parts are cherry picked or in most cases done because people think they should be done.

REST API Guidelines

May 17, 2018

This is here for future reference - a very good set of guidelines for REST APIs.

Developer platforms must listen to developers in order to grow

February 20, 2018

This is an excellent study on why developers are so important to a platform. At the moment we are developing a platform and we have been trying to get this message across to the business side of the company. This article backs up what we have been saying.

Coding