We’ve been building some content-managed websites recently (this one, for instance). We needed a storage solution, and, as with many other document-centric applications, a document-orientated database is really what we want – something that lets us read, write and query document-structured data (1). With Microsoft Windows Azure you have a bunch of different storage options available. Key/Value Pair data [...]

  So the first real work started yesterday afternoon with an introduction to PowerShell. Since all new employees are required to sign up to variety of web services (Office 365, YouTrack, GitHub, WordPress, TeamCity, IPCop), it would save time to write a script to automate this on-boarding process. Starting with YouTrack, by using the web [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

The simplest definition of my mantra of  “work smarter, not harder” is: Using your intellect, skills, established patterns, tools and a fundamental understanding of the problem space to create an elegant solution, instead of a purely brute force approach. So many people jump straight into trying to solve a problem without actually trying to understand [...]