On Monday I had an insightful 1–1 with a senior engineer at RVU where we talked about system architecture, the aim of the conversation was to try and get him more comfortable with talking about system architecture. As we talking about the architecture we talked about different ways in which we could take it and the benefits and drawbacks of each approach.
This conversation led me to do some thinking around the principles of architecting a web application properly so I thought I would write up what I believe are the 8 most important principles we should be considering when…
I first started my journey as a software engineer back in 2008 when I joined ADP, building software for building merchants. This was my first experience working at a tech company, and as someone new to the industry, I couldn’t tell the difference between what were the good habits I should be picking up from my colleagues and what were their bad habits.
Since that first role, I have worked at 7 different companies across a variety of different industries, which as a result, gave me the opportunity to work with some incredible engineers that I have been able to…
Today I was reading Medium and I came across several articles that talked about how you should avoid using GitHubs new Copilot feature. For an industry that is always keen to try new things I was surprised to see so much negativity for what is, at the moment a mere technical preview of a new technology the GitHub team is working on.
After reading a few of these articles and giving them some thought I thought I would write my own opinions on this matter.
Before I get started, for reference the articles I read were:
When looking for ideas for my next blog post recently, I came across this post by Rik Lomas to get a tech industry job. I liked his points on showing off your skills and how you can find companies you are interested in using job boards. However, I felt the post fell short in that it didn’t give many tips on how to research whether a company is right for you. I therefore decided I would write a post dedicated to this topic.
If I rewind to back when I was looking for my first software engineering role in 2008…
As a developer who works extensively on a Mac I have spent many years tweaking and optimising how I configure my CLI to improve my experience.
Today I thought I would share how you can start to customise your own CLI to make it work better for you.
Installing Homebrew
The first thing I always do when I setup a Mac is open the default Terminal app and install homebrew. Homebrew calls itself “The missing package manager for macOS” and is an easy to use tool for installing all sorts of applications (both CLI and GUI) on your Mac.
To install homebrew…
Earlier this month I wrote a blog post which listed the 5 Mac Applications You Need as a Software Engineer however one of the comments made a very valid point that not all Software Engineers have a Mac.
This made me take the time to think about the last time I did software engineering professionally on Windows which was back when I worked at a marketing agency called Crayon London. While at Crayon, my manager insisted that as the work we did for BT was written in .NET, that it made sense to run Windows. …
Recently I was talking to one of the Senior Software Engineers I work with at RVU regarding how we can get him more involved in the planning of our system architecture.
As part of this, I wanted to point him to some resources on system architecture, my focus was identifying things that would encourage him to think about different ways to solve problems. …
Today I was reading about a software engineer called Carla Notarobot who had written about her journey into tech.
For her tech never was her first choice, she was more into building physical things however when studying business she was bored in those classes and would find herself doing free coding tutorials online instead.
After doing a internship at a Fortune 500 company she found it bored her tears so she decided to take an Intro to Programming class fall of her junior year. She eventually changed her major and did extra summer classes to catchup and in 2018 graduated…
As a child growing up in the UK, a proverb that I would hear often was “A poor workman blames his tools”. The meaning behind this is that it is not the tools that make us good, it's more to do with how we employ them.
As I have grown older I have come to realise that to some extent, I disagree with this proverb. …
As a software engineer, I spend most of my time writing JavaScript, and by extension I find myself working with JavaScript Objects on a daily basis.
These objects can range in origin, from objects I create to store data myself through to responses to API Requests I have made. What the JavaScript Objects I work with usually have in common however is that I will at some point need to manipulate them in some way.
In order to do this, I have learnt many tricks I can use to make working with these JavaScript Objects easier and today I wanted…
Jonathan Fielding
Lead Engineer working for @RVU, speaker about web things, writing about tech, contributor to open source. If you like what I write make sure to follow.
