Work

My contract with NHS England has come to an abrupt end sooner than expected following a narrowing of focus within the Digital Prevention Services Portfolio. The team I was leading — designing and building components of a National Screening Platform — has been stood down. The work: making legacy health data interoperable and event-driven, surfacing screening journeys in the mighty NHS App, and integrating with ageing systems that only whispered their secrets under moonlight. Standard stuff. ...

There was a time, not so very long ago, when I firmly believed that my productivity was directly proportional to the number of screens on my desk. One screen? You’re a civilian. Two? Getting serious. Three? Welcome to the big leagues. Four? Now we’re talking. Five? You, sir, are a professional. Possibly even a Bond villain. For much of my adult life – from 1997 to 2022 — I was on a one-man mission to surround myself with glass rectangles. I wanted dashboards, terminals, Slack, Outlook, scrolling logs, live bond market charts, rolling 24-hour news, and maybe even some code all visible at once, like a NASA flight director minus the buzzcut and the cigarette. I told myself that it was efficient. That more screens meant more throughput. That toggling amounted to waste. ...

There are moments in the lifecycle of a project – quiet, almost undetectable ones – that act as inflection points. Not the big set-piece go-live days, with all the nervous Splunk-watching that entails. Not the kick-offs, not the design sign-offs. Just those little glimmers of “Oh, this is actually working.” One of those glimmers happened today. We’re a relatively new team, starting to build a new product, led by me – still only eight weeks into the role. ...

Folks, this is your lucky day — Ian Nelson is back on the market. After an unprecedented five years working the same gig, I will be available for shiny new contract roles from February 2023 (edit: now April 2023, thanks to a short extension). Download my CV here. Email me at ian@iannelson.uk What I’ve Been Doing Recently Since March 2018 I’ve been a Technical Lead for the NHS App, an England-wide way to access a range of NHS services via smartphone, tablet, and desktop web browser. It has been an amazing project to be a part of, and I’ve loved working in an open, collaborative, and agile delivery environment alongside a bunch of clever people from NHS Digital, Kainos, and BJSS. ...

As a lowly sellsword amongst the ensemble cast that make up the incestuous York/Leeds IT scene, I am not usually one to be influenced by the promise of titles and honours. Time was, long ago, in my first graduate job, that I yearned for a promotion from “Solution Developer” to “Development Specialist”. Now I give little consideration to what I’m called, and sell my services on the basis of what I can do, and the value I can bring to a project and an organisation. ...

Are you plagued by bad code smells? Troubled by slow-running database queries and ETL routines? In need of some scalable and maintainable enterprise integration solutions? Look no further! As luck would have it, legendary Leeds-based freelance software developer Ian F. Nelson is now available again for contract opportunities. Fresh from a 42-week stint at the Health and Social Care Information Centre where he played a major part in developing a suite of distributed systems to facilitate the expansion of a national programme to calculate health gains after surgical treatment, Ian Nelson is on the market again, and available now to help your team deliver the system of your dreams! ...

This blog post comes to you live from a Starbucks in the north of England. Yesterday I wrapped up another eight months’ stint contracting at my old haunt Marshalls Plc. It’s been a genuinely interesting gig, working on two distinct greenfield projects using bang up to date technologies including .NET 4.0 and MVC2. But it hasn’t just been a benefit for my CV, I think Marshalls might have got a little something out of the arrangement too, as Marshalls’ Development Manager Sion Harrison commented yesterday: ...

Well, for the record, I passed MS exam 70-553 yesterday on my second attempt, which makes me a Microsoft Certified Professional Developer – Enterprise Application Developer: And I also acquired a few new MCTS certifications as a happy by-product: My full transcript, including “legacy” certifications, is here. Phew! I think that the time has now come for me to take a bit of a break from the certification circus. They are a nice-to-have, but the opportunity cost is too high – there are many other ways in which I can spend what little spare time I have to better develop my skills. ...

I promised you some photos of my new office a while back, didn’t I? OK, here you go…

I’m coming round to the realization that my hugely enjoyable first contract at Ventura last summer might have been something of an anomaly. That project was decidedly agile, test-driven, and used a bunch of modern technologies including Monorail, ExtJS, Subversion, NUnit and NHibernate. The requirements were well-defined, and the team was highly effective, with a pragmatic project management team who kept the development team free from bureaucratic processes, leaving us able to get on with delivering some cracking software in double-quick time. ...

My current primary client has an annoying habit of closing for random days and half-days, including last Thursday afternoon. I decided to try to make the most of this time off, by taking Microsoft exam 70-553, which has the snappy title “UPGRADE: MCSD Microsoft .NET Skills to MCPD Enterprise Application Developer by Using the Microsoft .NET Framework: Part 1”. I’ve already passed the second part of the upgrade process (70-554), so passing this exam would give me no fewer than four new certifications, including the prestigious MCPD Enterprise Application Developer. ...

I started my career in professional software development a decade or so ago by testing and fixing banking code that had fallen victim to the millennium bug. Could the prospect of zero percent interest rates create a similar boom in demand for software developers? From Contractor UK: Interest rates have plummeted from 5% to 2% since early October and are heading lower. Some analysts say 0% is not out of the question. ...

On my continuing journey through this thrilling world of professional software development, I frequently encounter teams who hold no truck with this crazy new-fangled concept of unit testing. Heck, truth be told, I sometimes come across teams who don’t use source control, but that’s by the bye. In these situations, I try my best to lead by example, continuing to practise TDD on any new code that I cut, and insisting on covering with unit tests any pre-existing code which I have to modify. Sooner or later, this prompts someone to ask why I am doing this (often insinuating that I am wasting my time, and by implication the client’s money). At that point, flustered, I invariably struggle to remember or adequately articulate the many and various ways in which unit testing makes me a better developer. So, consider this blog post a personal aide-mémoire to help me the next time this occurs (as well as being a homage to Jake Shillingford’s second-best song). ...

I’ve never been a fan of those motivational posters that you see on office walls (usually in sales or marketing departments) that attempt to depict a word like “Opportunity” or “Teamwork” with a single image, usual of some nature scene or a lone individual rising above the odds to achieve a difficult goal. To my mind they always look a bit facile, glib and superficial. “Destiny” equates to a holiday villa on the Maldives? “Integrity” is a Lion? “Success” appears to involve hang-gliding off towards the ocean in an action which brings to mind Reginald Perrin?! I demand more thought and more words from my motivational office decorations! ...

I am now a Microsoft Certified Solution Developer in .NET 1.x technologies. This is a qualification that I’ve been working towards on and (more often than not) off for the past four years or so. It’s not really the case that the exams were super-hard, just that it took occasional motivation to get round to taking them! So, was it worth it? Did I learn anything en route? Did the exams boost my employability? Would I be more inclined to employ someone with an MCSD than an applicant without? ...