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Review: Logical and Critical Thinking - Future Learn

Logical and Critical Thinking Looking  for a bit of clarity I have (in my own mind)  been struggling with both giving my own arguments and interpreting arguments of others - mainly in the workplace - but also elsewhere.  I undertook this free course: Logical and Critical thinking created  - in part- by the University of Auckland. My interest was piqued because I am certain that good logical and critical thinking can help drive out  more clear solutions and help with more clear testing and coding and generally participate in debates better (in relation to work) and that maybe it could help in other day to day aspects of reasoning.   I have since read that it appears software engineering can actually foster better logical and critical thinking due to the need to tackle problems of different types and I can see that testing - in effect asserting truths and non-truths when validating behaviour - can also help, however I still think that a formal understanding could help hone these skills
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Continuous Workflows and ways of working

Kanban? Be careful... Times they are a changin... You may want to skip straight to the summary for a few key observations, the rest of the article is an anecdotal walkthrough of transitioning from SCRUM to Kanban and some of the problems experienced. My last post was in January this year regarding some TDD exercises I had undertaken, however I have actually been more involved in helping run our dev team for around 2 years in my first lead role for quite some years.  Lead roles where I work are far from strictly technical and I have seen myself - not with the greatest expertise it has to be said - performing BA/PO, SA, and ADM(aka SCRUM master) type responsibilities with a little bit of time left to do the thing I enjoy most. I am writing this with a ruffled SCRUM master hat on.  Unlike a famous beer I am probably the worlds worst SCRUM master (Well, maybe not that bad.. but I guess I am saying its not really an area I truly feel I can excel in - its more than just the SCRUM master cert
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Book Review: Test Driven Development By Example (Kent Beck)

GitHub I have coded the examples and both are available in GitHub.   Money  and xUnit  Delayed... I am recalling this after a few weeks finishing the book (I should've done this immediately so my memory is hazy, but the code examples should attest to the fact I have read it, if my descriptions of the text are a little ambiguous)  I have read this book on a number of occasions previously, in reference form and once all the way through,  but hadn't worked through the examples in  a code editor.  I think, for real value, you have to  code the examples, after a while it does feel like you are actually pairing, like others who have reviewed this though, I think the humour leaves a bit to be desired but its not too distracting! I have been TDDing for a while but this was a good refresher and reminded me of the maxims and techniques "fake it till you make it",  "obvious implementation" and "triangulation". There are also some nice "red" and &quo
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Book Study: 99 Bottles of OOP by Sandi Metz

Review to follow, just finishing it.  Basically its good. Perhaps that is enough of a review.
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End to End testing using Reactive Extensions (RX)

A change of tack is needed with my posts.  The limited people who have read my blog have been too kind to say that I talk a bit too much in my posts.  So I've read back over my posts and I am musing like some kind of pseudo-intellectual who is smiling smugly and patting  himself on the back over some kind of  new insight into stuff which is really just a regurgitation. So I should stop it and keep the musings to a minimum from here on in. I've rewritten this post to try and give something valuable that can be taken away and used. Requisite Knowledge General C#, Generics, Messaging Patterns, NServiceBus, Linq, Understanding of asynchrony, Task<T>, Unit testing. Reactive Extensions  I decided to use Rx to help end to end test a payment method service.  I wont go into a lot of detail about Rx, and instead refer you to an absolutley fantastic reference, which can be found at reactivex.io . The visualisations -  especially -  help bring to life what Rx does and can help
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Micro Post: Big Glass of Sand

Monolithic architecture is classified as a Big Ball of Mud Microservices architecture is therefore a Big Glass of Sand I said it first , right here.
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Testing, Testing, 1.2.3.4.5.6..ad infinitum

Before testing... I've now been in development/engineering/coding/hacking or whatever you want to call it for more than 10 years.  Testing has always been important, but it  - in my line of work - is now at the forefront of everything I do.    For the business this is great, every line of code, component and group of components is covered by some set of tests. Be it unit, integration, component...the overloaded terms go on.   This means that a set of requirements -  to some degree  - have been determined to have been met by these tests and the business is getting what it wants (all manner of development and agile practices not withstanding - they all get us to the same place) It struck me today though that earlier in my career, when testing was still important but lines were  - perhaps - a little more blurred and things were a bit more hit and miss, things were less clinical, less contrived and quite frankly less boring.  This is obviously not a good model for delivering qual
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