Author: Chris Oldwood
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Unravelling Conflict
An interesting question came up at a meet-up I recently attended, where they were discussing approaches to coaching and mentoring. The question was not overly interesting by itself, but the roller-coaster of a journey as we got to the essence of the re…
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Using CoPilot-Like Tools is Not Pairing
Ever since the rise of LLM based tools like ChatGPT and CoPilot there have been quips made about how great it makes as a pairing partner. The joke is because these tools are passive and won’t trash your code, or disagree with your approach, or smell of…
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Crafters Meetup: Architecture Kata
Last time I wrote about the monthly Cambridge Software Crafters Meetup which I started attending almost a year ago. In that post I briefly mentioned the Architecture Kata session which I found particularly interesting as I’ve never done anything like t…
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Cambridge Software Crafters Meetup
Despite living pretty close to Cambridge I’ve never actually worked there. For the past 25 years I’ve commuted to London because it was easier and faster than getting to Cambridge [1]. The daily rates for contract programmers in the finance industry mi…
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Naming Functions: When Intent and Implementation Differ
Most of the time these days when I get into a conversation about naming it tends to be about tweaking the language, perhaps because I think there is a much better term available, or the author is a non-native speaker and they’ve transliterated the name…
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Naming Functions: When Intent and Implementation Differ
Most of the time these days when I get into a conversation about naming it tends to be about tweaking the language, perhaps because I think there is a much better term available, or the author is a non-native speaker and they’ve transliterated the name…
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Our Star Baker
Just over 14 years ago I posted the eulogy I wrote for my father on this blog (So Long and Thanks For All the Onions) mostly because I had just started writing and this blog gave me the confidence to write. Sadly, a month ago my mother passed away too …
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Our Star Baker
Just over 14 years ago I posted the eulogy I wrote for my father on this blog (So Long and Thanks For All the Onions) mostly because I had just started writing and this blog gave me the confidence to write. Sadly, a month ago my mother passed away too …
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Unpacking Code Ownership
This post was prompted by a document I read which was presented as a development guide. While the rest of it was about style, the section that particularly piqued my interest was one involving code ownership. For those of us who’ve been around the bloc…
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Unpacking Code Ownership
This post was prompted by a document I read which was presented as a development guide. While the rest of it was about style, the section that particularly piqued my interest was one involving code ownership. For those of us who’ve been around the bloc…
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WMI Performance Anomaly: Querying the Number of CPU Cores
As one of the few devs that both likes and is reasonably well-versed in PowerShell I became the point of contact for a colleague that was bemused by a performance oddity when querying the number of cores on a host. He was introducing Ninja into the bui…
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WMI Performance Anomaly: Querying the Number of CPU Cores
As one of the few devs that both likes and is reasonably well-versed in PowerShell I became the point of contact for a colleague that was bemused by a performance oddity when querying the number of cores on a host. He was introducing Ninja into the bui…
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Chaining IF and && with CMD
An interesting bug cropped up the other day in a dub configuration file which made me realise I wasn’t consciously aware of the precedence of && when used in an IF statement with cmd.exe. Batch File Idioms I’ve written a ton of batch files ov…
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Chaining IF and && with CMD
An interesting bug cropped up the other day in a dub configuration file which made me realise I wasn’t consciously aware of the precedence of && when used in an IF statement with cmd.exe. Batch File Idioms I’ve written a ton of batch files ov…
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Transient Expand-Archive Failures
[I’m sure there is something else going on here but on the off-chance someone else is also observing this and also lost at least they’ll know they’re not alone.] We have a GitLab project pipeline that started out as a monolithic job but over the last …
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Transient Expand-Archive Failures
[I’m sure there is something else going on here but on the off-chance someone else is also observing this and also lost at least they’ll know they’re not alone.] We have a GitLab project pipeline that started out as a monolithic job but over the last …
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Lose the Source Luke?
We were writing a new service to distribute financial pricing data around the trading floor as a companion to our new desktop pricing tool. The plugin architecture allowed us to write modular components that could tap into the event streams for various…
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Lose the Source Luke?
We were writing a new service to distribute financial pricing data around the trading floor as a companion to our new desktop pricing tool. The plugin architecture allowed us to write modular components that could tap into the event streams for various…
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The Case of the Curious Commit Message
I had taken a new contract at an investment bank and started working on a very mature codebase which was stored in ClearCase. As a long-time user [1] of version control systems one of the things that bugged me about the codebase were empty commit messa…
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The Case of the Curious Commit Message
I had taken a new contract at an investment bank and started working on a very mature codebase which was stored in ClearCase. As a long-time user [1] of version control systems one of the things that bugged me about the codebase were empty commit messa…
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Planning is Inevitable
Like most programmers I’ve generally tried to steer well clear of getting involved in management duties. The trouble is that as you get older I think this becomes harder and harder to avoid. Once you get the mechanics of programming under control you m…
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Planning is Inevitable
Like most programmers I’ve generally tried to steer well clear of getting involved in management duties. The trouble is that as you get older I think this becomes harder and harder to avoid. Once you get the mechanics of programming under control you m…
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Pair Programming Interviews
Let’s be honest, hiring people is hard and there are no perfect approaches. However it feels somewhat logical that if you’re hiring someone who will spend a significant amount of their time solving problems by writing software, then you should probably…
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Pair Programming Interviews
Let’s be honest, hiring people is hard and there are no perfect approaches. However it feels somewhat logical that if you’re hiring someone who will spend a significant amount of their time solving problems by writing software, then you should probably…
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Fast Hardware Hides Many Sins
Way back at the beginning of my professional programming career I worked for a small software house that wrote graphics software. Although it had a desktop publisher and line-art based graphics package in its suite it didn’t have a bitmap editor and so…
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Fast Hardware Hides Many Sins
Way back at the beginning of my professional programming career I worked for a small software house that wrote graphics software. Although it had a desktop publisher and line-art based graphics package in its suite it didn’t have a bitmap editor and so…
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Simple Tables From JSON Data With JQ and Column
My current role is more of a DevOps role and I’m spending more time than usual monitoring and administrating various services, such as the GitLab instance we use for source control, build pipelines, issue management, etc. While the GitLab UI is very us…
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Simple Tables From JSON Data With JQ and Column
My current role is more of a DevOps role and I’m spending more time than usual monitoring and administrating various services, such as the GitLab instance we use for source control, build pipelines, issue management, etc. While the GitLab UI is very us…
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Weekend Maintenance as Chaos Engineering
I was working on a new system – a grid based calculation engine for an investment bank – and I was beginning to read about some crazy ideas by Netflix around how they would kill off actual production servers to test their resilience to failure. I reall…
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Weekend Maintenance as Chaos Engineering
I was working on a new system – a grid based calculation engine for an investment bank – and I was beginning to read about some crazy ideas by Netflix around how they would kill off actual production servers to test their resilience to failure. I reall…
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Blog Post #300
I signed off My 200th Blog Post in November 2014 with the following words: See you again in a few years. At the time I didn’t think it would take me over 5 years to write another 100 blog posts, but it has. Does this mean I’ve stopped writing and gone…
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Blog Post #300
I signed off My 200th Blog Post in November 2014 with the following words: See you again in a few years. At the time I didn’t think it would take me over 5 years to write another 100 blog posts, but it has. Does this mean I’ve stopped writing and gone…
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Cargo Culting GitFlow
A few years back I got to spend a couple of weeks consulting at a small company involved in the production of smart cards. My team had been brought in by the company’s management to cast our critical eye over their software development process and prov…
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Cargo Culting GitFlow
A few years back I got to spend a couple of weeks consulting at a small company involved in the production of smart cards. My team had been brought in by the company’s management to cast our critical eye over their software development process and prov…
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Branching 0 – Git 1
My recent tirade against unnecessary branching – “Git is Not the Problem” – might have given the impression that I don’t appreciate the power that git provides. That’s not true and hopefully the following example highlights the appreciation I have for …
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Branching 0 – Git 1
My recent tirade against unnecessary branching – “Git is Not the Problem” – might have given the impression that I don’t appreciate the power that git provides. That’s not true and hopefully the following example highlights the appreciation I have for …
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Git is Not the Problem
Git comes in for a lot of stick for being a complicated tool that’s hard to learn, and they’re right, git is a complicated tool. But it’s a tool designed to solve a difficult problem – many disparate people collaborating on a single product in a totall…
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Git is Not the Problem
Git comes in for a lot of stick for being a complicated tool that’s hard to learn, and they’re right, git is a complicated tool. But it’s a tool designed to solve a difficult problem – many disparate people collaborating on a single product in a totall…
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Choosing “a” Database, not “the” Database
One thing I’ve run across a few times over the years is the notion that an application or system has one, and only one, database product. It’s as if the answer to the question about where we should store our data must be about where we store “all” our …
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Choosing “a” Database, not “the” Database
One thing I’ve run across a few times over the years is the notion that an application or system has one, and only one, database product. It’s as if the answer to the question about where we should store our data must be about where we store “all” our …
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Automating Windows VM Creation on Ubuntu
TL;DR you can find my resulting Oz and Packer configuration files in this Oz gist and this Packer gist on my GitHub account.As someone who has worked almost exclusively on Windows for the last 25 years I was somewhat surprised to find myself needing to…
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Automating Windows VM Creation on Ubuntu
TL;DR you can find my resulting Oz and Packer configuration files in this Oz gist and this Packer gist on my GitHub account.As someone who has worked almost exclusively on Windows for the last 25 years I was somewhat surprised to find myself needing to…
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Arbitrary Cache Timeouts
Like many other programmers I’ve probably added my fair share of caches to systems over the years, and as we know from the old joke, one of the two hardest problems in computer science is knowing when to invalidate them. It’s a hard question, to be sur…
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Arbitrary Cache Timeouts
Like many other programmers I’ve probably added my fair share of caches to systems over the years, and as we know from the old joke, one of the two hardest problems in computer science is knowing when to invalidate them. It’s a hard question, to be sur…
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Validate in Production
The change was reasonably simple: we had to denormalise some postcode data which was currently held in a centralised relational database into some new fields in every client’s database to remove some cross-database joins that would be unsupported on th…
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Validate in Production
The change was reasonably simple: we had to denormalise some postcode data which was currently held in a centralised relational database into some new fields in every client’s database to remove some cross-database joins that would be unsupported on th…
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PowerShell’s Call Operator (&) Arguments with Embedded Spaces and Quotes
I was recently upgrading a PowerShell script that used the v2 nunit-console runner to use the v3 one instead when I ran across a weird issue with PowerShell. I’ve haven’t found a definitive bug report or release note yet to describe the change in behav…
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PowerShell’s Call Operator (&) Arguments with Embedded Spaces and Quotes
I was recently upgrading a PowerShell script that used the v2 nunit-console runner to use the v3 one instead when I ran across a weird issue with PowerShell. I’ve haven’t found a definitive bug report or release note yet to describe the change in behav…
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CI/CD Server Inline Scripts
As you might have already gathered if you’d read my 2014 post “Building the Pipeline – Process Led or Product Led?” I’m very much in favour of developing a build and deployment process locally first, then automating that, rather than clicking buttons i…
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CI/CD Server Inline Scripts
As you might have already gathered if you’d read my 2014 post “Building the Pipeline – Process Led or Product Led?” I’m very much in favour of developing a build and deployment process locally first, then automating that, rather than clicking buttons i…
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Abstraction with Database Views
After being away from the relational database world for a few years it’s been interesting coming back and working on a mature system with plenty of SQL code. It’s been said that SQL is the assembly language of databases and when SQL code is written onl…
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Abstraction with Database Views
After being away from the relational database world for a few years it’s been interesting coming back and working on a mature system with plenty of SQL code. It’s been said that SQL is the assembly language of databases and when SQL code is written onl…
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The Perils of Multi-Phase Construction
I’ve never really been a fan of C#’s object initializer syntax. Yes, it’s a little more convenient to write but it has a big downside which is it forces you to make your types mutable by default. Okay, that’s a bit strong, it doesn’t force you to do an…
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The Perils of Multi-Phase Construction
I’ve never really been a fan of C#’s object initializer syntax. Yes, it’s a little more convenient to write but it has a big downside which is it forces you to make your types mutable by default. Okay, that’s a bit strong, it doesn’t force you to do an…