We Are Devs

A change of tack is needed with my posts.  The limited people who have read my blog have been too kind to say that I talk a bit too much in my posts.  So I've read back over my posts and I am musing like some kind of pseudo-intellectual who is smiling smugly and patting  himself on the back over some kind of  new insight into stuff which is really just a regurgitation. So I should stop it and keep the musings to a minimum from here on in. I've rewritten this post to try and give something valuable that can be taken away and used. Requisite Knowledge General C#, Generics, Messaging Patterns, NServiceBus, Linq, Understanding of asynchrony, Task<T>, Unit testing. Reactive Extensions  I decided to use Rx to help end to end test a payment method service.  I wont go into a lot of detail about Rx, and instead refer you to an absolutley fantastic reference, which can be found at reactivex.io . The visualisations -  especially -  help bring to life what Rx does and can help

Monolithic architecture is classified as a Big Ball of Mud Microservices architecture is therefore a Big Glass of Sand I said it first , right here.

Before testing... I've now been in development/engineering/coding/hacking or whatever you want to call it for more than 10 years.  Testing has always been important, but it  - in my line of work - is now at the forefront of everything I do.    For the business this is great, every line of code, component and group of components is covered by some set of tests. Be it unit, integration, component...the overloaded terms go on.   This means that a set of requirements -  to some degree  - have been determined to have been met by these tests and the business is getting what it wants (all manner of development and agile practices not withstanding - they all get us to the same place) It struck me today though that earlier in my career, when testing was still important but lines were  - perhaps - a little more blurred and things were a bit more hit and miss, things were less clinical, less contrived and quite frankly less boring.  This is obviously not a good model for delivering qual

I haven’t written anything for ages as  I’ve been the busiest I have ever been at my current employer – a large E-Commerce Website -  as a result of preparation (planned and unplanned) for its largest ever “Peak” weekend, my company’s name for the Black Friday weekend.     Sorry this is a long read so grab a coffee or skip to the Summary, or don't read it! I’ve started writing this on the train coming back from London where I was required to provide extra-support for the Payments Platform (Domain)  - where I ply my trade – a group of Microservices and Legacy components supporting Payment processing for the Website and sitting very closely to the Orders Domain.  I expected to be bleary eyed and wired to the hilt, full of coffee and adrenaline as me and my colleagues worked like mad to pull out all the stops to make our giant incredible machine work properly. But no, as our CIO put it, everything just worked (well 99% of the time – more on this later).  The freeze

Its true (well sort of) When I was learning to drive I was pre-occupied with where to put the gear stick, where it actually was, when to use the clutch and so on and so forth and being flustered all the time. But, quite quickly, with continued practice and with growing familiarity and confidence with a car, I could think about where I wanted to go instead of every detail of what I needed to do, to get there, and now I drive like Lewis Hamilton. Before  I could start to TDD fairly well (In my .NET C# world) and be able to decide what works for me (for example choosing when to use classic and mockist TDD) I had to become comfortable with some pretty basic things including a good refactoring tool - ReSharper , a good test runner and Unit testing framework like NUnit and a good test isolation (mocking) library, like Moq (all of these tools have their proponents and detractors)  but this is what I use for the majority of the TDD I do at the moment, this could change, but the principl

I will never forget the above When using substring and you can't work out why "\n" is not 2 characters refer back to this title.  Does it make me look stupid, Yes, hopefully I will work this out sooner next time.  To be fair to myself its like and and.  That is all. 

^^Perhaps^^ For various reasons me and my team hadn't been spending a lot of time at the coal face, coding.  From spikes, POCs and analysis to release activity -  coding opportunities have been few and far between. Thankfully this changed over the last couple of weeks. As part of the Payments Platform we have been given the opportunity to chip away at some of the Legacy processes to provide more flexibility in our Payments offering.  Part of this process see's us hoping to consolidate some existing logic to manage the integration with a 3rd party Payment Solution Provider more flexibly.  Specifically around handling particular types of payment which are handled differently based on certain criteria such as a customers Billing country, what currency they are paying with and the card type they are using.   Stuck In essence the work we are carrying out is a redesign and re-factor of some logic which is spread out in a number of places.  Bringing it all in, has been both  i