James Simmonds

If like me you have been in the IT/development game long enough you will realise that the software/technology is sometimes the bit part player in a scenario - often commercial and business aspects overshadow things by a long way. Along with that is the soft skills side of the equation - thankfully something I picked up well enough when I was with Conchango (now EMC consulting )... A brilliant blog I stumbled upon, again via High Scalability is AKF Partners . These guys specialise in consulting around site and application scalability and have a great blog on a variety of topics associated with building software including team composition, hiring and management, security, hardware, vendor negotiations, SOA, deployments, how to be a CTO! If you find that you need to up to date on IT concerns not directly technology related then this blog is a must read - they have some great thought provoking posts.

My hundreth post on this blog. Anyway.... My current project is coming to an end and its been interesting looking back at what has happened on it from a technical perspective. The most interesting thing for me is that I have had to invest some time in thinking how to scale the solution to grow with the demand the business expects to see. I've been following the High Scalability feed for a while but a post led to another blog which has really impressed me - Ricky Ho's "Pragmatic Programming Techniques" . In particular Ricky's recent post really chimed with me as I've struggled recently to try and capture, even formularise why I've make certain design decisions and found there wasn't really anything more than "instinct" that pushed agility into the design in certain areas and away from others. The post is a very good read and great summary of a Kent Beck talk he attended - well worth 10 minutes of your time. I'd have loved to been at tha

A couple of useful links that I have discovered recently that you might like... Google Public DNS - I updated my router and all is well...the internet is still "working" and it "feels" just that bit snappier...some comparitive testing with firebug/fiddler between my ISP DNS and Google is necessary to get a real idea of any performance improvement but using Google for DNS isn't all about improving resolution times . Evernote - A colleague showed my this the other day and I finally twigged that this wasn't Mac only - for some reason I though it was....anyway installed and impressed. If you need a multi computer scrap book then this has got to be a great place to start. You can also add content with your iPhone or WinMo device. CrashPlan - free for personal use (ad supported) backup service that supports mapped network drives ( kinda! workaround documented here ). I have a RAID1 NAS drive (bought after I lost all our photos from corrupted HDD -doh!) so I h