Work

“Would it help if we reduced the number of questions from fifteen to ten?” That was the response when I asked what I had thought was a fairly ordinary question: “What’s the algorithm?” I had just joined a small marketing company that had decided it was actually a new media IT company. They had landed a project connected with Pedigree Chum and the Crufts Dog Show. Their big idea was to build a little interactive exhibit called Selectadog. Visitors would amble over to a stand, answer a series of questions about their lifestyle, and the software would recommend the perfect breed of dog for them. ...

Back at the start of 2019, when the NHS App had just launched, it had something of a discoverability problem. The kind of problem where people would type “NHS App” into the App Store search bar and be presented with results including Microsoft Outlook, WhatsApp, Candy Crush and in fact pretty much anything but the NHS App. Not ideal for a flagship digital health intervention. I was contracting as part of the Kainos team helping NHS Digital deliver the App, alongside partners from BJSS. We’d toiled long and hard during 2018 to build a thing that could handle login, appointments, repeat prescriptions, medical record, and more. But what good is your lovingly crafted digital gateway to the NHS if nobody can find it? ...

Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Embrace the Betweening When you’re in between contracts, it’s easy to feel like you’re stuck in limbo. Professionally adrift, spiritually buffering, half-dressed in last Thursday’s joggers. You refresh LinkedIn. You reword your bio again. You stare into the fridge like it’s about to make you an offer. Somewhere around day four, with no stand-ups to attend, no Jira tickets to nurture, and a growing sense that time had lost its formatting, I decided that the only rational move was to make a list of things to do. ...

I lost my contract this week. A narrowing of scope. A bit of internal restructuring. The kind of small shift that leaves no room for a tech lead who only joined the project a few months ago. It stings a bit, of course, but not in a way that surprises me any longer. I’ve been in the game long enough to know that not every project will cross the finish line and make it into production. Sometimes, it’s not even a matter of tripping before the ribbon, it’s that someone quietly packs away the course and decides that the race never needed to be run in the first place. ...

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. ...