Table Stakes: What is expected of a modern software developer?

Table stakes is a bit of business jargon, loosely taken from poker, that is used to describe the minimum offering it takes to be in the market. The essential features or attributes that have to be there for customers to even consider buying a product or service, the basic capability a team or department needs to demonstrate to be credible. I’ve used this as the title of this article as I’ve been reflecting on how our current batch of interns have fared over the last year and what could we could do to make things easier for the those joining us this time round.

Increase REST API development velocity by ditching application/json

After creating a few RESTful apis I’ve learnt the hard way that agreeing on the structure of the messages going backwards and forwards can be difficult but what can be even more difficult is managing the changes to these messages once the first implementation has been committed. Going with the default option of returning and accepting everything as application/json typically means that the client and server will need to synchronise their release cycles when breaking changes occur.

Getting Started With Clojure Links

Last week I gave an introduction to Clojure presentation to my client’s developers. With only an hour to work with I just scratched the surface of the language so recommended a set of resources that would allow them to find out more. I thought I’d share them here as well. Here are a few good articles that mainly talk about the reasons for choosing Clojure as your programming language http://blog.

Rethinking Java Application Packaging

I’ve recently been working on a couple of new applications and wondering, why is it that even though they are greenfield is there something that makes them a bit to awkward to work with? I’m sure you’ve experienced these kinds of problem once or twice. You know there’s a class that does something but can you find it. You want to make a refactor but you can’t quite get everything to line up where you want it.

Badass - Book Review

As an agile developer, I think that it’s important that it’s not just the scrum masters and agile coaches that doing the the thinking about how agile teams work and what they could better. Which is why I try to do some digging into agile topics each year and why you’ll find a few articles about agile across this blog. This year I’m looking into the role of the product owner.

Easy blogging with Hugo, CircleCi and Surge

Once I’d decided to start this blog, I wanted to make sure that it was as simple as possible to look after. So, having used Hugo on a couple of other projects it was the first point of call. Hugo is an open source static site generator that uses markdown as its content source and then applies a theme to create the site. I love this separation of the content and styling, it has allowed me to easily transform the look of a site without reworking the content and its great to be able to write a web page without really thinking too much about the formatting.