Confessions of a coding addict.

Recently I gave a talk a the Newcastle Coders Group around the agile process that I and my colleagues have built up at work.  This talk covered a few areas but the key take away point that seems to interest people is how we applied agile techniques to higher level projects so that we could have a shared language with the stakeholders outside of the development team and our business could better understand what we're doing.   One of the problems that we've repeatedly encountered over the years is that stakeholders outside of our Product Development Team (PDT) are baffled when we say that we are running out of work.  We're faced with responses like "How can you be running out of work? We've told you about all these things that you haven't done yet!",  and of course we experience the counter point to that, "Why haven't you done this thing that I want yet? You can't be that busy", the inevitable answer to which is "Because we're...

I always like to know what influences someone I am reading has, it helps me to understand their position and how they have come to their opinions.  To that end the following blog is a brief overview of my software development journey so far. My name is Klee Thomas and I'm a Software Developer and aspiring Software Craftsman. I'm passionate about Software Development and use words like craftsman and clean code, possibly a little to, often.  I only started developing professionally a few years ago and am lucky enough to work with people who share my drive towards self improvement.  I am a regular attendee and occasional presenter at the Newcastle Coders Group. I am not one of those people who started developing at a ridiculously young age.  When I was in primary school and early high school I played the occasional computer game and made one or two Power Point presentations.  I had no idea what Software Development was, let alone how to do it.  I did a l...

This article explains how with a couple of quick hacks you can gain a little extra productivity when using NuGet.  The hack it's self is simple, Just add NuGet's local cache as a feed.  It turns out this can save you time, keep you team mates on side and even improve your presentations. Originally I did this to help with development of API's that develop and use in house.  We were facing a problem with rapidly increasing version numbers when initially developing an API for the business logic of our product.  Each developer was working on one vertical slice of the product meaning that they may have to tweak the API if they found something that they hadn't considered in one of the layers of the application.  The simplest way to develop the package dependent on the API is to update it with NuGet.  Our process for getting packages into the shared NuGet repository is simple.  We publish packages to NuGet after a build on our Continuous Integr...