Ian Wold

I first became aware of hallway usability testing (also referred to as "guerrila" testing) at the beginning of my career when I was encouraged to read The Joel Test, a now-famous article on what makes a good team.

Author's note: I have updated this article with some extra bits of information as well as a repository demonstrating this solution.

One year ago, Microsoft released the C# Dev Kit extension for VS Code, promising to bring the solution explorer to the editor along with quality of life updates around building, packages, testing, and other niceties.

As I posted a couple weeks ago, this month is the anniversary of restarting my blog!

There's a lot of interest in programming languages anymore.

In 2013 I, a young software engineer, purchased ianwold.com and set up a simple site to serve as a landing page for myself.

Happy Labor Day to those in the US!

The penultimate fallacy of distributed computing is "transport cost is zero."

In my recent exploration of the eight Fallacies of Distributed Computing, the first five have all regarded, almost exclusively, the technical aspects of distributed systems.

I hope you all in the northern hemisphere are enjoying summer; I've been trying to take some extra time here and there to enjoy things before Minnesota inevitably plunges back into the depths of winter, so I've been writing a bit less (and combining two m…

Retrospective meetings are a cornerstone for most modern software engineering teams.

As with all things, there are a lot of different practices our teams might adopt around pull requests (which I prefer to call "peer reviews", but we can agree on "PRs").

Prolog is truly a leader at the forefront of modern technology, and if you're anything like me then you're convinced that this langauge is the way forward for our microservice APIs.

Some of my earliest memories are from stories that my grandfather used to tell.

I've previously written about this problem in the C# world that interfaces are overused.

One of my favorite lectures concerned with software engineering methodology is Allen Holub's War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength, Scrum is Agile, in which I believe he convincingly articulates that Scrum is harmful and that it is not e…

As I'm reviewing and writing overviews of the fallacies of distributed computing, I'm trying to keep observations and suggestions at a 10,000-foot view: I want to describe each problem, related patterns, and convey the mindset behind the fallacy.

Happy Memorial Day to those in the US, I haven't had time to post a lot this month but hopefully this one is controversial enough to make up for it!

The result pattern is one of my favorite functional patterns to use in the C# world, and I don't think I'm alone on this.

In my last post on latency I cited an interesting definition given by David Boike: TotalTime = Latency + (Size / Bandwidth).

Indeed, Object-Relational Mappers (ORMs) are a negative thing to me.

Just the other day I released my free planning poker app and there was one thing missing that I really wanted to have: end-to-end encryption.

For the last week and a bit I've been working on FreePlanningPoker.io and I think it's ready enough to show off.

The IndieWeb is a small and loose collection of formats and protocols which allow those of us with our own sites to identify each other and their content across the web.

Did you know that the speed of light is getting faster?

The Twin Cities Code Camp was the first programming conference I attended.

Everything is too complicated.

I don't know of a lot of successful software projects that don't have some sort of list of tasks defined.

I'm on the record as having labeled myself a unit test hater.

When the Fallacies of Distributed Computing were first written in the 90s, networks were unreliable.

Anyone who has worked with me for any period of time is probably tired of hearing me say this.

Coding standards can be a blessing or a curse: a practical resource that helps the team consistently maintain their codebases or an overbearing cudgel of impractical formatting prescriptions.

Note of warning to the reader: the words "productivity" and "efficiency" occur in abundance in the following text.

There's a lot to love about C# and .NET, and there are some things that I don't love as much.

This question - what is a software architect?

Less is More Write less code, use fewer abstractions, be simple and concise.

There are a lot - and I mean a lot - of options when you're considering a database to use.

Ho ho ho merry book club day - I'm sending this one out a bit early; tomorrow I'm headed on vacation and won't be back until the new year.

This is the one clever trick that Agile coaches don't want you to know: you can actually become an Agile team.

It wasn't that long ago that I tasked myself with updating a few microservice codebases to be able to work on VS Code along with Visual Studio.

One week ago, my homepage was around 550k uncompressed and took about as many ms to load.

If being in meetings all day isn't bad enough, spending more time thinking about them seems horrible.

If you're using a relational database, even perhaps for a small personal project, you've almost certainly had to have a serious think about migrations.

I'm looking forward to turkey day tomorrow gobble gobble!

Yes.

Last time I looked at Railway, I got it up and running with a Blazor WASM app.

That Mongo doesn't natively support sequential IDs is one of the many knocks against it.

Happy spooky season!

One of favorite article is The Grug Brained Developer.

I had an unexpected and not entirely unpleasant experience in a recent retrospective meeting: all of the engineers on the team moved to stop having daily standup meetings altogether.