Ian Wold

I'm a fan of pretty readme files.

My least favorite topic in software engineering is, at any given time, the subject of the current hype cycle.

Just hear me out on this one: software architecture is like magic in fantasy novels.

You know how you're not supposed to start an essay with a dictionary definition?

Greetings from Nottingham!

This book club is a bit of a throwaway on a subject that's more esoteric than my usual; in my defense, I've been spending most all my time on a major effort at work (hello, boss: I promise I'm actually working!)

SignalR is, I think, a good bidirectional networking library.

Constraints, in a very broad sense, have been on my mind this last month.

Like most folks in our industry, I've been using GitHub extensively for a long time, and I've become very familiar with it (and, as a consequence, Git).

If you're new to my blog, one important thing to note is that my thinking regarding team and organizational practices tends to align with that of Allen Holub, at least so far as what I've gleaned from a number of talks and blog posts he's done.

I like asking dumb questions each week as a teambuilding thing; I made a site to show a random question each week: QuestionOfTheWeek.io!

If you've visited my blog before, you know that I live in Minneapolis.

I'm not very good at coding for performance.

"My best-architected projects were the ones that never had an Architect."

Even if you're not following the Scrum Guide, a "sprint" has become the default unit of time for software engineering teams to encapsulate a single chunk of deployable work.

I guess this is more of a short announcement post, but I would encourage other .NET engineers to consider doing the same.

Happy Turkey Day!

It's been more than six years since the last major version of .NET Framework (4.8) was launched along with C# 7.3, and the .NET world has come a huge way in that time.

I've been pretty short on time in the last few months; my recent rate of output on this blog might attest to that.

These last two months, the interesting thing that I'm researching is asynchronous communication patterns.

If you're a fan of Wordle-ing with your work colleagues, you've probably run into a similar problem as I have.

Happy summer!

I have this one specific psychic power, when I speak to a software engineer I can tell them how many half-finished, abandoned, sometimes barely-started personal projects they have scattered between source control providers and dusty hard drives.

I like simple things in software: simple engineering, simple architecture, simple tools.

.NET 10 is finally introducing a feature that is some 20 years (give or take a few) too late, allowing a single CS file to be ran as a standalone program, not requiring any solution, project, or Nuget files.

In March I moved to a different role at my current firm, and the thing that's changed the most for me is incidents.

NocoDB is an interesting open source project I came across some weeks ago; it aims to be an OSS alternative to Airtable.

I've been working as a software engineer in the Twin Cities for quite some time, and I value keeping up with my colleagues here.

I've just published verion 1.0.0 of [CFWeaver, my test generation project]!

So a bit ago I got shuffled around onto a new position, I am now the leader of the team responsible for PLPs, PDPs, and such item-related things at crateandbarrel.com.

Two weeks ago I started working with a new team at my company, and the first (real) meeting I attended with the team was a manager's attempt to start increasing the documentation the team kept.

A few weeks ago I wrote about how it's okay to be a bit techy in your Gherkin, by which I mean that it's okay to include technical sorts of language in your Gherkin.

There's a heck of a lot of blabbering that's been written on the topic of what makes a team, department, or firm successful.

It seems like it was just the other day that microservices were the cool thing to be doing, but as fads come and go the microservice fad has waned.

Last week, I wrote about some thoughts I had related to test generation and control flow in business logic.

I've written before on my enthusiasm for the result pattern, but I'm going to expand on that a bit here and how it relates to testing.

Many months ago, I set up Umami to track views on my blog.

From microservices to blockchain, from the dotcom bubble to AI, our industry has a surprisingly high hype cycle density.

While I'm not much a fan of unit tests, I'm a big fan of integration tests, particularly for distributed services.

No, the title is not an innuendo, I mean tests written in Gherkin, the language developed to facilitate better BDD practices.

Happy holiday season and new year to you all!

There's a degree of popularity around claiming that pull requests are bad and we shouldn't do them.

I wrote in a recent post about Jevon's Paradox, and I received some feedback on that; more than I usually do.

Happy Turkey Day gobble gobble!

There is plenty of conventional "folk"-ish wisdom to be had, and a lot of it is widely known if sometimes unintuitive.

The new .NET and C# are out as of yesterday, and I'm underwhelmed.

Do you read blogs?

A bit ago I collected a list of links to blogs that I enjoy tuning into.

Happy Halloween!

The eighth and final fallacy of distributed computing is "the network is homogenous," originally referring to network hardware.