About

Me

I work as a Software Development Manager in the UK. I don’t get my hands on the code as often as I’d like to but still do get heavily involved with both the design and architecture of the solutions that we develop.

The Team

The team is split into three Squads a.k.a. Spotify. We don’t follow this model rigidly (in fact we haven’t taken it further than Squads yet), like most things its a work in progress, the main drivers are scaling the team and ensuring we have the right focus on our key products.

The Tech

We mostly develop back-end micro services and our tech stack is primarily .net hosted in Azure. Consumption based services (Azure functions, Cosmos and even SQL SaaS) works in most of our use cases and it’s great value for money. It’s hard to judge where we are with DevOps compared to everyone else but we’re having a good bash (no pun intended). All our code repo’s are in Azure DevOps along with our build and release pipelines; infrastructure is code as far as we’re concerned and all our Terraform repo’s are in GitHub. We are getting better with our unit testing and are now starting to look at using SpecFlow for contract testing on deployment; again, a work in progress.

The Aim

Writing focuses the mind and hopefully this blog will help me get a better understanding of the stuff that I blog about. It will likely be a mix of some of the more spikey stuff the team picks up; in these cases I’ll probably be writing up someone elses work (I’ll give credit where it’s due).

I might even post some entries on more of a management theme, who knows.