There are a number of patterns that reveal themselves to us daily. The sun rising and setting; the moon exposing itself to the tides below. There is a variance of change depending on the time of the year, month or day. Over time you if you keep track of it; the pattern will emerge. The same truth is applied to software development; over time if you keep track of the changes (success or failure) the pattern will emerge. I love anti-patterns; I love to learn about them in the software world. The world that I am interacting with; I also love to find the patterns that are around us. What commonality does this issue have to similar issues we have had? Some of my favorite anti-patterns are: the golden hammer, NIH (not invented here), and spaghetti code. Not to say that I enjoy these anti-patterns, but that the causation of why these occur. If you keep track of them, i.e. documentation, you will be better equipped to deal with them.

Testing is a hard part of software development. One of the hardest aspects of development is testing code/features that you have created. It is easy to put the blinders up and write to the spec. Insider knowledge of the system probably plays a role in this difficulty. Seeing a system through user eyes is nearly impossible, but to get close you need to decouple yourself from the code.

“Change is the only constant in life.” - Heraclitus

Deploying ASP.NET web applications is a breeze with Jenkins and can really improve continuous integration/testing environment for UAT.  It is also possible to do production deployments with scheduled builds.

“Requirements rarely lie on the surface.  Normally, they’re buried deep beneath layers of assumptions, misconceptions, and politics.”