Career

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. ...

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: ...

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? ...

Elizabeth Keogh has been blogging her advice for software-developer apprentices, and recommends buying and reading a selection of good software development books. I think this is sound advice – personally I felt that my career and abilities starting taking off when I stopped reading tech-specific Wrox tomes that were obsolete within six months of publication and started buying timeless Addison-Wesley hardbacks. Why so many newbie coders insist on rediscovering solutions to well-known problems instead of leveraging the knowledge of our programming forebears is beyond me, but most of us have behaved in this way at some point. Give yourself a leg-up and read some decent software design books. ...

A major project I’ve been working on for the last ten months has just gone live, giving me some time recently to take stock, do a bit of R&D, and catch up on some reading. I’ve been reflecting on how to approach things better in the future, and to this end, I’ve just finished two very different books about the software development process. O’Reilly’s Extreme Programming Pocket Guide is a handy little summary of the approach (only 81 pages), depicting a near-utopian development shop where everyone is happy, and projects come in under budget and on time. It got me quite fired up, actually, and some of the concepts described are interesting. But deep down, I just know this would never happen in the real world—too much politics, too many personalities at play in the workplace, in my humble opinion. ...