31 Oct 2023
Most start-ups fail. Intuitively, they fail because they run out of money. But what’s the biggest reason for this? The Lean Startup, by Eric Ries, speculates it’s because too many companies build the wrong product for the wrong people. He goes on to extoll the value of the MVP (Minimal Viable Product). MVP is the basis for discovering what matters to your audience.
23 Feb 2023
Two big issues plague software development teams, and funnily enough they can seem at odds to each another. The first, the more obvious, technical debt. Old code that’s grown stale and probably wasn’t written by anyone still working on the codebase. No one’s sure what it does or whether it’s still necessary, but it still “works” and certain tests require it to be there to pass.
27 Sept 2022
I read a thought-provoking Tweet recently which unfortunately I’ve been unable to dig up now. Essentially, it proposed the notion that, when building software, we need fewer code reviews and more pair-programming.
17 Nov 2014
Packages are great. For PHP, Composer has made modularising your code and managing dependencies within your app easy peasy. The topic of this blog post, however, is about what exactly constitutes a package, and where things do and don't belong. I will be talking in the context of the Laravel, as this is what we use at work, but these points should be roughly relatable to any modern framework that utilises Composer.
26 Jul 2012
I've never really *got* web development frameworks. Sure, I understand what they're trying to achieve and I can appreciate they can save you a lot of time. But I don't see the benefit of them in the long term.
15 Jul 2012
I'm a web developer by trade; concerning myself more with how stuff works, rather than how it looks. It's somewhat of a cliche, but, as with a lot of people, I don't feel I chose my career, it sort of chose me. I simply did what I found interesting. I liked computers, so I did 3 years at University studying them; got myself an internship, followed by a job, and since then haven't really looked back since.