Andy Palmer

This is an unfinished thought. Conversation is encouraged. I’ve started reading Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman(check out my Kindle highlights) Kahneman was one of the first to identi...

https://andypalmer.com/2014/11/thinking-out-loud-fast-and-slow/

I’ve created a project on GitHub to make it easy to install WordPress onto Heroku. Plugins and themes can be specified and installed via the composer.json file. The seven steps are: git clone h...

https://andypalmer.com/2014/06/seven-steps-to-wordpress-on-heroku/

Design patterns are about how something does it’s job, rather than why. Using a design pattern name in the name of a class makes it quite fragile. For example, if you have called all your class...

https://andypalmer.com/2014/05/fragility-of-design-pattern-named-classes/

I’ve been diving into a few new technologies recently, and I’ve been heading to Google to find tutorials and documentation to help me out. I was describing my frustration with the way these t...

https://andypalmer.com/2014/03/whats-wrong-with-technical-tutorials/

Teams often use personas to help them identify their users and the types of actions they’ll perform. This is usually a workshop exercise that will last many hours and identify 5-10 key characte...

https://andypalmer.com/2014/03/soap-opera-personas/

My current project is managing the software and distribution of a hardware appliance. We send out physical machines to our customers and we really need to know that they are all identical. I’ve...

https://andypalmer.com/2013/09/opscode-chef-and-the-single-responsibility-principle/

I’ve uploaded a presentation about Maintainable Code that I put together for a client almost a year ago. It’s a lot more text than I’d prefer in a presentation, but this was for a small gro...

https://andypalmer.com/2012/11/maintainable-code/

An external consultancy can help an organisation progress in a number of ways. When not outsourcing, these usually fall into three categories; training (someone shows you what to do, in a control...

https://andypalmer.com/2012/07/what-can-a-consultancy-do-for-me/

At RiverGlide, we’re often asked to help with “Agile transformations”. My definition1 of agile is being flexible to adapt an existing process. That is, if your existing process looks like w...

https://andypalmer.com/2012/05/agile-is-a-means-not-an-end/

Those of you who have followed my blog, been subjected to it on a client site or have talked to me about programming will know that I have a few issues with checked exceptions. Well, this morning...

https://andypalmer.com/2011/11/finally-a-use-for-checked-exceptions/