Hiatus Over

Where I explain what I've been up to.

When I moved from the startup world of uncertainty to a little more certain world of delivering web apps, e-commerce and otherwise, my writing slowed. Getting your knowledge down, distilling it into written form is an important part of consuming information. So here I am back ready to distill my current thought processes about the world wide web.

Moving to Made, introducing continuous delivery pipelines, bringing agile rails to teams who want to modernise, writing for Made's blog and hiring fledgling developers has been a career changer for me. It's all very exciting stuff!

The opportunities presented at Made Tech are eye openers and exciting but I'm also very busy. Being pushed into blogging with the rest of our team has only highlighted the neglect I've been giving my own site. I am pretty opinionated but I also hope I'm a conduit for interesting conversations, I want to put more effort into my personal blogging.

Over the past year and a half my idealism has been balanced out with a healthy sense of pragmatism. I am a fan of using the tools available rather than reinventing several wheels. That said, I always have my idealism as an end goal, it's just one I'm getting more and more relaxed about not reaching.

Functional programming is still having a huge impact on the way I see systems and components interacting. I'm an avid fan of map/reduce and using more basic constructs of arrays and hashes eeks into my rails work. I'm testing like crazy these days at both the feature and unit level.

As I work with teams and improve our workflows, my understanding of agile is growing. There are no magic bullets to controlling and delivering projects, but the understanding that it's always a human issue and that conversation beats any tool and process is now engrained in me.

I hope over the coming weeks and months I will be able to share some of my more personal journeys through the web.