Making Software on Tales about Software Engineering

I am back at home, a few days after my first experience of Agile on the Beach.

It is a couple of weeks after my trip to Leeds to go speak at BSides.

In this post I am looking at using the mongo aggregation pipeline in non-trivial ways.

As I am sitting at Schipol Airport, contemplating that the airport is so big it has a branch of the Rijksmuseum, I can’t help but thinking about the fabulous conference I’ve just been to.

As I am sitting on the 16th floor of the Okura Hotel in Amsterdam in my Batman pyjamas and facing a large mirror, just glimpsing the paper crane that was so lovingly put on my pillow, I’m starting to reflect what has happened during the day.

FADE IN: INT.

“Outdated tech stack and metaphorical gaffer tape holding together the code” - sound familiar?

The question of automatic dependency updates came up in our Slack channel the other day.

From a security point of view, application logs are two-sided.

Let me tell you a story about Application Security (AppSec).

There’s a metaphor about the fight between attackers and defenders in the Denial of Service cybersecurity game.

I am sitting on the train as I type this coming back from my first IRL conference.

This is part of my series of interview questions for Agile India 2022.

This is part of my series of interview questions for Agile India 2022.

After being accepted for speaking at Agile India 2022 I was asked a few questions.

Dave Farley and Allen Holub are two people that I respect hugely when it comes to Software Development.

I was really positively and pleasantly surprised when I found out what HMRC Digital’s mission statement was.

In this post, I am going to look at an increasingly important part of securing applications: Your supply chain.

This post peels back the covers on what it is like to work with a large digital platform.

First of all I need the preface this article on how much I abhor the Russian invasion of Ukraine and I wholeheartedly support the sanctions.

A few days back as part of a general discussion about interviewing at Equal Experts, we looked at the question “What makes a good developer?”

Pwnkit is a vulnerability that uses a bug in polkit to elevate permissions to root.

In this writing I ask: When will this madness end?

Day 22 of Advent of Code 2021 was all about cubes.

On Day 21 of Advent of Code 2021 we played Dirac Dice!

Hmpf.

Day 18 of Advent of Code 2021 took rather a long time to get right.

On day 17 of Advent of Code 2021, I did something that I should have really done from the start: Write tests first.

For day 16 Advent of Code 2021, it was all about monadic parser combinators (whatever they are)!

Advent of Code 2021 day 15 took us back to the 2-dimensional maps we first encountered on Day 11 and Day 9.

After Advent of Code 2021 transparent origami on Day 13 with more output than just a number, for Day 14 it was back to more standard processing with exponential complexity.

On day 13 of Advent of Code 2021 we had to do the impossible.

For Advent of Code 2021 day 12 it took me a while to get going though for reasons unrelated to coding, Norovirus is not pleasant!

Advent of Code 2021 day 11 felt a little bit like a repeat of Day 9.

Day 10 of Advent of Code 2021 was all about mismatched brackets.

Dave Farley and Martin Fowler are two heavyweights when it comes to Software Development.

On day 9 of Advent of Code 2021 I arrived at two different solutions for parts one and two.

On day 8 Advent of Code 2021 adventure, part 1 lulled me into a false sense of security.

On the 7th day of the submarine Advent of Code 2021 adventure, I felt like the problem was getting a bit easier than it had been of late.

On the next day of Advent of Code 2021 there were two approaches to solving the problem.

Following from my efforts on Day 4 of Advent of Code 2021 I was encouraged to try writing up more of my attempts to teach myself Haskell while having fun trying to solve puzzles.

For Advent of Code 2021 rather than just thinking “Hey, what a good idea - I should give that a go” and then promptly forgetting about it, I thought it would be a good opportunity to explore Haskell a bit more.

Scenario: You’re in a handover session and explain everything in great detail but Dave is too hungover, Jim is on holiday and Jane is at another meeting and Chris isn’t asking any questions and in any case Trevor (who is actually going to be looking after…

In this writing I aim to complete a Fizzbuzz without if statements, conditionals, pattern matching or even using modulus calculations.

In this blog post, I would like to explore how missing input validation even in a trivial service can leave parts of server infrastructure crumbling.

After upgrading my AWS RDS instance from Oracle 11g Oracle 19c, my DB Link stopped working with a certificate error.

It’s now about two weeks since the HMRCs splurge on getting the UK to go out for a meal has finished.

This post describes how I developed the Discount Dining Finder a lookup map tool for the Eat Out to Help Out scheme in my spare time.

To successfully deliver software a developer needs a shield and a sword.

In this post, I describe my personal experience of being part of a software development team working with Equal Experts and HMRC during Covid-19.