Welcome to the Surfsoft Cnsulting blog. Maybe it’s my age (I am over 40 after all) but in the last few years I’ve occupied senior positions in development teams where I’ve spent significant amounts of time trying to educate people not just in how to write code well, but how to undertake the whole software engineering process properly. Development is 80% engineering process and 20% technical skills – a good engineer will pick up new skills quickly and so knowledge of sound engineering practice is extremely important but usually under-rated.
Writing code is, to many developers, the most enjoyable and creative aspect of their work. Many of us, and I’m as guilty as the next person from time to time, rush through design in order to get to the fun bit. However there is a lot more to producing a successful piece of software than just cutting code. My intention in this blog is to share my own experiences and offer advice and suggestions to allow people to better understand and operate within the software engineering process, and to ultimately produce better quality software. Aside from that I will also be blogging about general tech/geek things close to my heart but not necessarily directly relevant to software engineering, but hopefully of some interest.
Before I start blogging in earnest I’d like to tell you a little about myself. You can find out about my career by viewing my public profile on LinkedIn so here I shall focus on the technologies I’ve used, and am using, rather than who I’ve worked for and when.
At Coventry Polytechnic (now Coventry University) I studied Information Systems Engineering and learnt Pascal and C, and assembly language (Z80, 6502, 6809 and 68000) although I already had good knowledge of Basic and assembly language (Z80 and 6502) from school and my trusty ZX81. During my Masters degree (Real Time Electronic Systems at Bradford University) I also studied Ada and Occam.
Between 1988 and mid-1997 I worked with Pascal, Fortran, Cobol and C, along with Ingres and a bit of Sybase on Unix and VMS systems. Between 1997 and 2001 I worked exclusively with Oracle – PL/SQL, Forms and Reports, and from 2001 I have worked exclusively with Java, J2EE and Oracle and MySQL databases. Many languages, several operating systems and a multitude of software engineering processes and configuration management systems.
As far as methodologies go, Waterfall and RAD (Rapid Application Development) reigned until I moved to Java, where iterative development and the RUP (Rational Unified Approach) were initially the mainstays of my development processes. Iterative development still rules but for the last couple of years I have also been working in SCRUM environments.
At this point I should make it clear that everything posted here is my own, personal viewpoint. I am not attempting to represent the views of my current, or any past, employer, and nothing I post should be taken as a criticism, explicit or implied of any of my employers.
And finally… I’m not a brilliant diarist, so please don’t expect regular postings. Lots of postings, yes, but there will be gaps.