Frontier Town

Ship It!, from the Pragmatic Programmers series of books

This is a guide to getting software projects done and out of the door, from the publishing house started by the people who wrote The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master. This book is firmly aimed at the engineers doing the development work - there's little talk of requirements and scheduling, or other project management issues. This is all about using the right techniques to get your code working reliably, and your coders working together. Richardson and Gwaltney have experienced working on - and in some cases rescuing - many projects, and this book documents the practices they have found works best in their experience for getting software finished.

Welcome to Frontier Town

Hello! I'm starting a blog. While the rest of the world is starting to catch on to Twitter, and social networking is now a normal part of life for many, I'm just entering the 21st century with a blog.

A blog will usually follow something about the author's life, so it's relevant to talk about me for a second. I'm a software engineer, and have been for about 10 years or so, so I consider myself to be experienced. I've been working in C# on .Net for the last three or four years, and ASP.NET specifically for the last two. Before that I did a lot of work in C++ on UNIX and embedded systems. I've been a Linux enthusiast for all of those 10 years and, although I'm using it less, still believe in open source and use many of its tools daily. All in all, I hope a wide and varied experience.

Moving away from work, I live in Edinburgh, Scotland. I'm not Scottish, though - I moved here after graduating. Edinburgh is a brilliant city and I've no plans to leave it for some time! I've been vaguely interested in photography and recently got my first D-SLR camera, so you may be lucky to see me post some of my best photographs.

But the main focus of this blog will be my work. Like many people, I'm in search of the perfect workplace - and, like many people, I haven't found it yet. But my current workplace has the potential to be, and I will be working hard to improve it. The software engineering literature is full of lots of techniques to make software development much more productive - techniques like test-driven development, agile methods, continuous integration, as well as the traditional software engineering processes like defect tracking and release management. But how does a small software business, starting from little process, get there? I'm following this journey, and will be sharing the steps I (and the rest of the team at my workplace) at taking.

My first few posts are likely to be fairly unimaginitive - basically, a couple of book reviews - but I hope to get in to more original posts as I go. My aim is to post regularly, every week (although I expect that this will occasionally drop to every two weeks) on Tuesday mornings UK time.

I hope that you find some useful information here. Please feel free to comment on any articles - I hope to take a generally hands-off approach to comment moderation, and simply ask that you <span style="font-style: italic;">be nice</span>, and reserve the right to delete comments that aren't. If you don't want to leave public comments, you can send an e-mail to richard@frontiertown.co.uk.

Finally, where does the name "frontier town" come from? Read this news article to find out the back story - I was living in this area at the time it happened, and heard a radio journalist refer to the place as a new frontier town, and decided to adopt the term when I bought an Internet domain for myself.