Last year, as part of a series of posts, I asked: “Are you investing in your own career?“. This, in part, came about from a great quote that heard: Do you have 10 years experience, or 1 year’s experience repeated 10 times? I think the majority of developers starting out are fired up and excited…
If you’re trying to access a class library (.NET Standard) from a traditional console application (in VS2017 those can be found under ‘Windows Classic Desktop’) you will run into problems; which can feel a little strange for something that was pretty simple in VS2015 and earlier. You can add a reference to the class library…
Working in software development, a decent pair of headphones is a must. I’ve lost count of all the pairs that I’ve owned over the years! I’ve had some really good wired pairs but they’ve tended to die an early death when kicking my chair back to scoot across the office to speak with a colleague…
I’m definitely getting back into Android development, I’m remembering that feeling of ‘Surely this should be easier than this!’. All I wanted to do was to schedule a local notification which behaved similarly to a push notification pop-up. That is, as well as showing the small icon in the status bar I wanted it to…
A recent discussion at work made me realise that over the past few years learning Android development I’ve managed to build a short but very useful list of links for starting out. Not a really detailed post this time around, but hopefully these links help at least one person, let me know! Development environment: We…
I can still remember my first phone interview for a job. I had no idea what to expect so really wasn’t looking forward to it, but it can’t have gone too badly because I got the job. Now that I’ve been lucky enough to progress in my career to positions where I’m conducting the other…
Sometimes, no matter how much you prepare, you’re just going to have a bad interview! I just wish someone had given me that nugget of advice when I was starting out. If you’re into fitness, as you’re probably painfully aware, some days you can be really looking forward to a run/swim/workout. But when you start…
In my previous articles I have written about are you investing in your own career and starting out in software development. But there is another important question, is your company investing in you and your career? In my current role, I am lucky to work for a great company that values its teams/employees and have…
If you’re trying to begin your career in software development it might feel like all the positions you see are asking for previous experience and there are few opportunities to gain that required experience. In my opinion, as a relatively new industry, it feels like we’re currently going through some growing pains. Companies are struggling…
As developers we are in an interesting, potentially unique, industry where the bar for entry is extremely low. A large proportion of the population have access to computers / internet and many of the popular languages / IDE’s are free. In fact you can start your development career with just a browser and notepad/textedit, learning…