JW.PE

A quarterly update on my software engineering and engineering management consulting business.

It’s been one month since I announced my consulting launch, so I thought I’d check in with an update on my progress so far.

I'm starting to offer consulting services in engineering management and software development. Here are my goals.

The last couple of days have been relatively productive. Thanks to GitHub's excellent API documentation, I've got to the stage where I can reliably authenticate a user with my application via Oauth, and use their key to pull basic user info such as their private email address and GitHub ID.

Today I began work on my project in earnest. It always helps me to visualize my goals if I can draw them out, and I still find pen and paper to be the best medium for rapidly exploring ideas.

Today is August 1st. Now that I have been back in Bristol for a little while, it's time to knuckle down on a project that I've been thinking about in some form or another for the last few months.

I am an avid Sufjan Stevens fan. I really enjoy his peaceful, somewhat melancholy style of music. As a person who is not religious myself, one of the things that I find interesting about his songs is that religious - specifically Christian - themes seem to appear quite broadly across his oeuvre.

Today we will be talking about mocking. No, not the joke at someone else's expense kind. Mocking is a technique to temporarily replace real parts of our code with fake, simpler parts, so that we can check that the rest of the parts are working as we intend.

Markdown is great. As a formatting language, I find it to be pretty much unparalleled for speed and ease of syntax. Not having to think overly hard about style allows you to focus purely on the quality of the content.