After years of years contemplating, I've finally started my blog. So welcome and thanks for visiting.
What am I going to write about? Well my intention is to write about two personal projects of mine (more about those in a second). But I also hope to blog about random thoughts on software development, on topics such as continuous delivery, automated testing and SOA.
My first personal project is already live - cycle-with.me. I'm a keen cyclist and have built a web application (C#/ASP.NET MVC 5) to organise rides with your friends. Basically Outlook Calendar but specifically for group bike rides and a field for specifying where you are having coffee afterwards. Technically the application has really just been thrown together to help my build out the ideas for the product, and the most interesting parts so far have been the product development side. My plans are to re-write the web app using SOA/WebAPI/Durandal and to build iOS and Android applications using Xamarin. And to of course add many more features.
As if one side project isn't enough, I've just this week start my first open-source project FeatureToggle. Feature toggling is a concept introduced to me by a colleague of mine Sean Reith. The basic premise is that you don't create feature branches in your code repository, but instead commit often to trunk and 'toggle' features on and off depending on which environment you have deployed to. Going live is no longer 'big bang', but instead flicking the feature toggle switch.
The idea behind FeatureToggle is to provide a library to do the heavy lifting to implement featuring toggling for your application. Initially I will look at WebAPI and Durandal using RavenDB for persistence.