Rikard Ottosson on software, systems and the people around them
I have recently “thought led” on LinkedIn, claiming that the future of software development lies in mob programming. I think this take automatically flips my bozo bit in the minds of certain listeners, whilst for many pe…
I know in the labour market of today, suggesting someone pick up programming from scratch is akin to suggesting someone dedicate their life to being a cooper. Sure, in very specific places, that is a very sought after sk…
I know that both my readers are software developers, so – this is a bit of a departure.…
When considering what provider to use in order to polish and cut the diamonds that are your deployable units of code into the stunningly clear diamonds they deserve to be, you have probably considered CircleCi, Azure Dev…
When building software in the modern workplace, you want to automatically test and statically analyse your code before pushing code to production. This means that rather than tens of test environments and an army of manu…
Within software engineering we often talk about Technical Debt. It was defined by elder programmer and agilist Ward Cunningham and likens trade offs made when designing and developing software to credit you can take on, …
I had the chance to attend the Software Design & Development conference at the Barbican Centre this week. It was my first conference since the plague so it was a new experience. I will here coalesce some of the main poin…
Life is just people and things working together to make things difficult for you. Like on a rainy windy day where you can just lean into the wall of oncoming air and water and just push through.…
In 2020 I learned the meaning of the English expression Busman’s Holiday, and it generally applies to software developers that write code on their free time, but especially so during a pandemic with abundant remote worki…
In recent times Microsoft have begun to performance test their web platforms. Whilst previous generations of their .NET framework and ASP.NET web platform had prioritised ease of development over performance quite dramat…
Working life, like any series of events, can be compared to other stories, such as those in cinema. Is your workday like Avengers Endgame when all your coworkers show up out of thin air and swarm to solve a difficult pro…
In the culture wars between “Object Oriented Programming” and Functional Programming, you will find proponents of OOP that argue that we are doing fine – why should we change? and proponents of FP that lists a litany of …
In which I add a custom prompt by making a hack in the PowerShell profile.…
I have come across a few things that are legitimately pleasant to use, so I thought I should collate them here to aid my aging memory. Dear reader, I am not attempting to copy Scott Hanselman’s tools listhttps://www.hans…
I’m going to rehash some learnings that I have made over the last decade and a bit of doing cloud in one way or another. I have recently read thought leadershttps://twitter.com/QuinnyPig report similar things – only bett…
In the beginning of time, Grace Hopper inventedhttp://www.women-inventors.com/Dr-Grace-Murray-Hopper.asp:~:text=She%20became%20Director%20of%20Automatic,friendly%20business%20computer%20software%20program business softwa…
You would have one database connection string, and that would be it. “The Database” would live in the darkest corner of the office and you would try not to interact with the physical machine that hosted the relational da…
Just like that rebrand cycle years ago when RUP consultants transitioned over to scrum masters through staged re-titling on LinkedIn and liberal use of search / replace in their CV, scaled agile frameworks and certified …
If you have a website that uses Open ID Connect for login, you may want to allow the user to be logged in directly after having validated their e-mail address and having created their password.…
I have previously written about the Windows Subsystem for Linux. As a recap, it comes in two flavours- one built on the concept of pico processes, marshalling the Linux ABI into Win32 API calls WSL1 and an actual Linux k…
I have tried to put a piece of API documentation behind interactive authentication. I have various methods that are available to users of different roles. In an attempt to be helpful I wanted to hide the API methods that…
Jeff Bezos may have tripled his fortunes in the last couple of months by price gauging hand sanitiser and bog roll during lockdown with 1000% markup, but some aspects of the empire are less well-functioning. Getting an i…
The old Windows command window, the “DOS prompt” has been around since the beginnings pf Windows NT, and is used when running batch scripts. It uses a model to describe its world that was probably fit for purpose in 1992…
Testing your SQL queries is as important as any other piece of logic. Unless you only do reads and writes, presumably some type of logic will be implemented at least in the form of a query, and you would like to validate…
In the early nineties, things were changing everywhere. The wall had just come down and half of Europe were encountering freedom for the first time in their lives. Metallica had found mainstream success. Hair metal died …
If you have seen the “code review” of Imperial College’s modelling code, after it being tidied up by Microsoft and others, and the reactions to it, I’d like to offer my unsolicited medium temp take on code review, legacy…
Maybe I am unfair, but when using Microsoft development tools, it often feels like they only as an afterthought are adapted for professional development. The main acceptance criterion is mainly – does it look cool to the…
I know a lot of people that work with Microsoft Azure, and I know a few people that work for Amazon Web Services. I go further back with the Azure people, so they get to suffer from my Facebook rants about how much Azure…
I previously dabbled with moving blogs off of WordPress.com onto Azure. This is a new story about moving on from there.…
.NET Core 3.0 is here, allegedly the penultimate stop on the roadmap before the Singularity, when they finally bin .NET Framework and unify on top of Windows XP… er… .NET 5. The news are packed with stuff about WinForms,…
Payment gateways for small businesses. What do you look for in them? Personally I don’t care – I crave simple pleasures.…
I have had the misfortune of delving into logging a lot lately. To save time for next time I will write down the findings here.…
This is a tale about a blog on WordPress.com that had a loyal readership and regular, high quality content so yeah, not writing about this blog. The owner wanted to use the odd plugin and advanced theme, and I was always…
I was recently presented with a conundrum. We had constrained data valid for the domain in a record type. Sadly this record type contained a reference datatype, so built-in structural equality broke down as the reference…
After continuing my foray into the functional with Giraffe and .NET Core, I have struggled with the code not quite reading very well. Various data sources are pluggable, i.e. they can be replaced with mocks if you don’t …
I thought I was going to write one of those listicles just to get going as I have posted nothing for half a year. Recent developments have made me take stock and figure out what certain people have taught me while workin…
When you start work on a code base, either from scratch or as you approach it as a new dev, there are a few things you should ensure are in place before you get going. Like most other things, these are easier and more na…
Sometimes you get so upset about something you need to blog about it, and ranting on Twitter, Facebook and Channel 9 comments just did not quite seem enough.…
EDIT: As you will notice a lot of my links point to the works of security researcher Troy Hunt, and I should point out that I have no affiliation with him. I just happen to find articles that make sense and they happen t…
The results of the latest StackOverflow Developer Surveyhttp://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2016 just came out, showing – among other interesting things – that Windows is dying as a developer OS. Not one t…
Me and a colleague have been struggling for some time deploying an IIS website correctly using chef. As you may be aware, chef is used to describe the desired state of the configuration of a system through the use of res…
These last couple of weeks I have been working with a Windows desktop app based on WPF. I hadn’t been involved with that in quite some time so there was some trepidation before I got stuck in.…
I have been saying a bunch of things, repeating what others say, mostly, but never actually internalised what they really meant. After a week with Fred Georgehttps://twitter.com/fgeorge52 and Tom Scotthttps://twitter.com…
I had to google myself silly and the page I ended up finding was so hard to find I couldn’t actually find it again to link to it properly. The below code is not my idea, so if you feel wronged, submit your link and I sha…
I have noticed some people come to this blog for reference on using Castle Windsor together with NHibernate and ASP.NET MVC, so I have to mention a few things that have happened since I last posted about it several years…
As a reaction to my earlier blog post on the Actor Model, Microsoft has allowed the public to get preview access to their Actor Model framework Orleans that they use to power Halo on XBox Live.…
One of my colleagues at Jayway launched a functional puzzle and solicited responses via Github gists. The challenge was as follows:…
F Actor: An Actor Libraryhttp://colinbul.wordpress.com/2013/05/21/f-actor-an-actor-library/.…
Wow, this was pretty interesting. I am definitely trying this right now. I didn’t realize F was Raven hostile, and also this unintended benefit of TypeProviders need to be announced off of the roof-tops.…
For the last year and a half I have been a part of the Øredev Conference Program Committee. I should at some point write a post about it, and yes, I have had a draft laying around for a while, so here it goes:…
In the .NET community perhaps the Actor modelhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actormodel of computing is not all that familiar. In this post I will briefly describe my understanding of the possibilities it gives the “real li…
People are talking about Scala, F, Erlang, Haskell and what-have-you. What is the point of functional? What is wrong with OOP? How does it all work?…
You should have by now – but if you haven’t – do try Windows Azure Websites. It is almost as usable as AppHarbor. Just register and start setting up your websites. For small blogs and wikis you can get away with internal…
I was thinking, in light of the fact that all our data, including this blog, is being scrutinized by foreign to me and most internet users powers, that maybe one should try to replace Google Apps and Outlook.com, well Go…
To continue the last post about the //BUILD/ Conference, what else is new? What should you look at now? A few things stand out and I will go through them in order.…
Although Øredevhttp://oredev.org/2013 "Øredev" as per usual will be the place to be, in this case November 4-8, Microsoft currently run two conferences of their own, TechEd Europe and more importantly //BUILD/http://chan…
I have decided to go ahead and set up a class that covers the basics and a few more advanced features of NHibernate. In order to take part in the class, please contact Dotway Stockholm at stockholm@dotway.semailto:stockh…
Gustav Nilsson-Kotte of Dotway Malmö, formerly manning the Göteborg outpost, has now re-emerged onto the scene with a very interesting bloghttp://gustafnilssonkotte.blogspot.com/.…
Back in the nineties when I trained as an apprentice coder at the University of Umeå, I was first exposed to the Dark Side. It was very seductive with an intuitive TCP/IP stack, simple signal management conventions, conc…
Because my esteemed colleague Carl Kenne outed his excellent blog on TDD and WPF I felt I should probably put together a little something re: the CAG for WPF and Silverlighthttp://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd45880…
In an unexpected move, I decided to go back and demonstrate the automatic injection of dependencies in the old Castle sample app from before. I did so because, well, not doing so I felt kind of missed the entire point of…
As the returning reader may have noticed I have used the Model-View-Controller framework for ASP.NET again and again in the few posts I have produced so far. This is because unlike the ASP.NET standard framework, the MVC…
Years later after this post was originally written, things have improved – see updates.http://opinionmachine.wordpress.com/2013/07/30/castle-windsor-nhibernate-mvc-revisited/ "Castle Windsor + NHibernate + MVC revisited"…
While working on a future blog entry I noticed that IIS7 does not take kindly to you just up and registering your own IHttpModules wherever you like. Do not forget about your %windir%system32inetsrvconfigapplicationHos…