Greycastle
not just code
Building products is hard, building good products, even harder.
Here you’ll find my hardships and experience described, in snippets, rants and software.
What do I do?
Build software
I’ve been coding professionally since 2008, more than 10 years now. I have been working both as an employee and contractor in public and private sector.
I’ve done desktop clients, web clients, batch processing systems and backends.
Improve
Since I wrote my first lines of Visual Basic code in my school days I have used many different languages and frameworks. I have found that coding is about more than the actual code though. I constantly try to improve both within and without the confines of the IDE to better myself in the hard and the soft parts of that which is the engineering craft.
Help out
Finally, though I do enjoy to tinkering on my own, building real products is seldom one man show. As such, I believe that it is incredibly important to work together and share knowledge. Which is what this blog is partly about. Giving back to the community that’s given me so much.
Sharing is caring
There are so many brilliant people out there in the world. Since I started developing I’ve been saved so many times by both framework creators and the StackOverflow community alike. I’ve a huge respect for the open source community and everyone that simply gives without asking anything back. So I want to do the same. I want to share both my experience in the form of my thoughts and experiences in this blog and also the code I put together.
Past projects
Some stuff I’ve written and I’d love for you use
It’s not much but in my free time I’ve put together a few projects that are still alive. I’m thrilled to see anyone using the stuff I’ve written or even perusing it so if you can spare the time and effort.
The blog
Introducing feature flags to Ruby on Rails
I suggested we use a feature flag. To begin with, we could even configure it to only act on a given store so we can test in isolation, in production, before releasing. This means we can deploy from trunk and easily roll back if it blows up. It also gives us the possibility to deploy ahead of time and simply flick the switch.
Dealing with legacy code – Lessons from the Moj
unsplash-logoMax Kukurudziak If you are reading this, chances are you have worked with or likely even been writing legacy code. This is a big issue in the industry, it causes people to be unhappy, unproductive and to switch jobs. It doesn't need to be this way. I...
Onboarding – Lessons from the MoJ
In September 2018 I got a contract for the UK Ministry of Justice and the Video Hearings project.
I learned a lot during this project and want to share it as it is fresh in memory. As it is a real-life experience it might be relatable as well.
As it was kind of a journey, let’s start telling it from the beginning, the onboarding.
