Starting in Summer 2021 and into early 2022, I started contemplating the next step in my career. I had been with the same employer for over seven years, matching a record for me, and the job market was hot. 🔥 In March, I made the choice to make the attempt…

Why I’m leaving my job to grow my career. — A quick history of my career tl;dr: I’ve been at this for a long time! (You can skip.) I started coding on Commodore 128 around 1987. I wrote and sold two BBS products on this platform. (Before the web, we’d use modems to “dial-up”, one at a time, onto the computer of somebody running a BBS…

Inspiration I ran across this blog post some time ago: Four reasons why everyone except for Computer Scientists writes sloppy code by Ari Joury It’s a really good write up, except that it starts right off in the title insulting a whole lot of developers. Joury doesn’t define who a Computer…

Let’s say you have existing applications on-premise, co-location, or private cloud, and an existing engineering team maintaining it. You recognize the benefits of moving to AWS’s public cloud, but how do you get there? The Outside Team When asked that question, nearly all consultants jump into how to move your application. They’ll talk…

A Book Review Introduction Throughout my career as a software engineer, certain nuggets of wisdom have come my way. I may pick some up from co-workers, from reading blogs, or often enough the old fashioned way — learning from my own errors. I have tried to pass along what I have…

From class-based IoC to functional TDD? — A journey — Introduction I come from an object-oriented programming (OOP) background — it was the hot stuff in my formative years of learning to program — driven by C++ and Java. Embracing unit testing meant embracing Inversion of Control (IoC) and Dependency Injection (DI). This was the way. As my language of choice…

SST v1! Serverless Stack (SST) is the latest in tooling to make it simpler to develop serverless applications in AWS. Serverless Framework is the biggest player in this field, because it was the first and did a pretty good job. I’ve used it for a few years. …

Explained for non-developers — In 2021, I was asked to participate in a podcast explaining software testing strategies to a team of people who were technical, but not themselves software developers. While I cannot share the actual podcast, I can share the prepared Q&A that was used as the basis of the live discussion. Can you identify some of the most common testing strategies in this industry and define what those are?

Robert C. Marten, legend of computer science, points out that half of developers have less than five years of experience. It has been this way since the very first programmers in the 1960’s; the number of programmers in the world has been doubling roughly every five years. Therefore, half of…