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Dominic Burford - Professional Profile



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I am a professional software engineer and technical architect with over twenty years commercial development experience with a strong focus on the design and development of web and mobile applications.

I have experience of architecting scalable, distributed, high volume web applications that are accessible from multiple devices due to their responsive web design, including architecting enterprise service-oriented solutions. I have also developed enterprise mobile applications using Xamarin and Telerik Platform.

I have extensive experience using .NET, ASP.NET, Windows and Web Services, WCF, SQL Server, LINQ and other Microsoft technologies. I am also familiar with HTML, Bootstrap, Javascript (inc. JQuery and Node.js), CSS, XML, JSON, Apache Cordova, KendoUI and many other web and mobile related technologies.

I am enthusiastic about Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery and Application Life-cycle Management having configured such environments using CruiseControl.NET, TeamCity and Team Foundation Services. I enjoy working in Agile and Test Driven Development (TDD) environments.

Outside of work I have two beautiful daughters. I am also an avid cyclist who enjoys reading, listening to music and travelling.

 

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GeneralSoftware Interview Skills 101 Pin
Dominic Burford12-May-17 5:44
professionalDominic Burford12-May-17 5:44 
GeneralBeat the Thrashing Pin
Dominic Burford5-May-17 6:03
professionalDominic Burford5-May-17 6:03 
GeneralWorking with Azure Blob Storage Pin
Dominic Burford27-Apr-17 2:29
professionalDominic Burford27-Apr-17 2:29 
GeneralWrestling with Apple Pin
Dominic Burford20-Apr-17 3:37
professionalDominic Burford20-Apr-17 3:37 
GeneralTwo unit tests, zero integration tests Pin
Dominic Burford10-Apr-17 22:39
professionalDominic Burford10-Apr-17 22:39 
GeneralThe Mediocre Mindset Pin
Dominic Burford29-Mar-17 1:10
professionalDominic Burford29-Mar-17 1:10 
GeneralHow much code coverage is enough? Pin
Dominic Burford21-Mar-17 5:14
professionalDominic Burford21-Mar-17 5:14 
GeneralThe Mythical Full Stack Developer Pin
Dominic Burford14-Mar-17 3:18
professionalDominic Burford14-Mar-17 3:18 
Just as Fred Brooks recounted the Mythical Man-Month in his famous essay back in 1975, so this article will take up the equally mythical role of the Full Stack Developer. We've all seen the job adverts for the roles wanting the Full Stack Developer. That person who can craft visually stunning user-interfaces, write elegant, clean code, and build a highly scalable, lightning fast production database. Is it just me, or does this seem rather far fetched?

Much of this demand comes from companies wishing to reduce their costs, namely their staffing costs. Rather than advertise and employ for each of the roles separately, they try to minimise those costs by employing a single developer who can do all of them. The market then responds to this demand in the form of developers cross-skiling as best as they can into areas that they are not familiar with, not experienced at, or just plain have no interest in. But to get a job they are forced to assume the role of Full Stack Developer as that is what the market demands.

I don't care who you are, or how good you think you are. No one is equally adept at all of these skills. They are all fundamentally different. Yes, they may all be involved in creating a software application, but that's where the similarity ends. If you ever needed brain surgery, you probably wouldn't want the cardiologist to take over in the event the brain surgeon was ill. But why not? After all, aren't they all just different forms of medicine?

But this is precisely what people expect from software developers. Rather than understanding that these are all different areas of speciality, requiring different skills and knowledge, they are all lumped together into a general purpose skill set. That brilliant graphics designer who can create stunning user-interfaces, has to also cobble together a workable database. An area they have little interest or knowledge.

The Full Stack Developer is essentially a compromised role. For example, whilst the successful candidate may be a brilliant software developer, they may also have poor user-interface skills. And whilst they may get the job done and create an acceptable user-interface, it will lack the visual appeal and immediacy of a true specialist in the field. People use specialists all the time. When you visit the doctor and it turns out you require a consultant in a particular field, you will be referred to a specialist in that branch of medicine, and everyone is absolutely fine with that.

Yet for some unknown reason, the software industry is being driven by an insatiable demand for general purpose, jacks-of-all-trades. When in reality, what it really needs, is more specialists. Software is an increasingly diverse, complex, growing and specialised industry. It's an industry that covers the web, artificial intelligence, database technology, avionic software, mobile apps, the Internet of Things etc. It is a huge and ever expanding industry. As such, people tend to specialise into areas where they have an interest and are passionate. Just like in so many other industries.

If you hire a Full Stack Developer, don't be surprised if your applications come with weaknesses due to the weaknesses in the skill set of the person you hired to do the job. What's worse, those areas of weaknesses may be in areas you can't see e.g. the database or code. In which case, you have no idea how good or bad the application really is, until it fails that is.
"There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult." - C.A.R. Hoare

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GeneralCreating your own private NuGet server Pin
Dominic Burford2-Mar-17 0:36
professionalDominic Burford2-Mar-17 0:36 
GeneralConsuming a dependency using NuGet Pin
Dominic Burford28-Feb-17 6:05
professionalDominic Burford28-Feb-17 6:05 
GeneralCoding Standards Pin
Dominic Burford24-Feb-17 6:02
professionalDominic Burford24-Feb-17 6:02 
GeneralSoftware Architecture Challenges Pin
Dominic Burford17-Feb-17 1:31
professionalDominic Burford17-Feb-17 1:31 
GeneralGetting the Most Out of Your Unit Tests Pin
Dominic Burford9-Feb-17 9:21
professionalDominic Burford9-Feb-17 9:21 
GeneralBuilding a strong development team Pin
Dominic Burford8-Feb-17 6:31
professionalDominic Burford8-Feb-17 6:31 
GeneralLast pieces of the mobile app in the Web API puzzle Pin
Dominic Burford27-Jan-17 5:03
professionalDominic Burford27-Jan-17 5:03 
GeneralSerializing .NET types that contain DateTime Pin
Dominic Burford22-Jan-17 18:53
professionalDominic Burford22-Jan-17 18:53 
GeneralClearing the Dead Letter Queue on an Azure Service Bus Queue Pin
Dominic Burford16-Jan-17 8:57
professionalDominic Burford16-Jan-17 8:57 
GeneralMigrating ASP.NET Web API services to the Azure platform Pin
Dominic Burford10-Jan-17 2:45
professionalDominic Burford10-Jan-17 2:45 
GeneralProcessing Azure Service Bus messages using an Azure Function Pin
Dominic Burford4-Jan-17 9:10
professionalDominic Burford4-Jan-17 9:10 
GeneralThe Structure of an Azure Service Bus message Pin
Dominic Burford30-Dec-16 3:11
professionalDominic Burford30-Dec-16 3:11 
GeneralMy Introduction into Service Bus Architecture Pin
Dominic Burford21-Dec-16 6:40
professionalDominic Burford21-Dec-16 6:40 
GeneralAdding resilience to your services by implementng a retry pattern Pin
Dominic Burford19-Dec-16 1:10
professionalDominic Burford19-Dec-16 1:10 
GeneralAuthenticating Web API services with JSON Web Token Pin
Dominic Burford13-Dec-16 2:26
professionalDominic Burford13-Dec-16 2:26 
GeneralDeploying to Azure with Team Foundation Server 2015 Pin
Dominic Burford9-Dec-16 2:29
professionalDominic Burford9-Dec-16 2:29 
GeneralCatch me over on Medium for my latest blog posts Pin
Dominic Burford7-Dec-16 1:15
professionalDominic Burford7-Dec-16 1:15 

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