Last week I was formally invited to become a member of the JetBrains Development Academy Board – to celebrate, I decided to give something back to the community that has a JetBrains flavour. As I mentioned in my last post – we’ve been doing a lot of ALM / DevOps work in the last year [...]

In the last 12 months we’ve been doing quite a lot of Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) projects helping teams setup Continuous Delivery processes. One of the tenets of Continuous Delivery is “Automate Everything” – which has been a core part of my “work smarter, not harder” ethic for a number of years. The technology that [...]

Ethical Foundations When we founded endjin, Matthew, Lloyd and I spent a lot of time thinking about the type of company we wanted to create; one recurring theme was that in our personal time we each did a significant amount of work for “good causes” and we derived a huge amount of joy and satisfaction [...]

A few weeks ago Geoffrey Smith, the Sharp Architecture Development Lead and I were invited onto .NET Rocks! to be interviewed about the Sharp Architecture project. After we talked about Sharp Architecture – the conversation lead on to other open source projects I’ve been involved with such as Templify and StyleCop for ReSharper. You can listen to the [...]

In 2008 Microsoft released Source Analysis a tool to help solve the thorny problem of coding standards in C# projects, soon afterwards they re-launched it using it’s original internal Microsoft name, StyleCop (to avoid confusion with the TFS Code Analysis tools), along with an SDK that allowed the community to extend the product. In May [...]

I’ve always been surprised by the number of people within the technology sector, in particular the software development industry who don’t have a  traditional computer science background. Some of the most talented software developers I’ve worked with have university backgrounds in chemistry, astrophysics,  geography, marine biology, just not Computer Science and two of the most [...]

Large productivity gains can be made by adopting a “Convention over Configuration” (CoC) approach when designing new solution architectures. To harness the full power of the Convention over Configuration approach, the development team must take a holistic approach by examining the ceremony required at every stage within the Software Development Life Cycle. In a previous [...]

I originally published this post on my personal blog but decided to revisit it and update it with a few things I’ve learnt in the following months. During DDD8 I attended Neil Robbins “Hello Document Database” talk, where he demo’d how to get started with CouchDB. Although I have heard a lot about the NoSQL [...]

At endjin, we host our development infrastructure on Sleek Network’s Virtual Private Servers, this provides us with a great mix of  reliability, power and flexibility. Because we believe in working smarter, not harder, our Issue and Bug Tracker of choice is JetBrain’s YouTrack. This is our second Step by Step Guide, which follows on from [...]

At endjin, we host our development infrastructure on Sleek Network’s Virtual Private Servers, this provides us with a great mix of  reliability, power and flexibility. Because we believe in working smarter, not harder, our Continuous Integration Server of choice is JetBrain’s TeamCity. We’ve believe that the combination of a virtualised development environment and a mature [...]