James Simmonds

If like me you have been in the IT/development game long enough you will realise that the software/technology is sometimes the bit part player in a scenario - often commercial and business aspects overshadow things by a long way. Along with that is the soft skills side of the equation - thankfully something I picked up well enough when I was with Conchango (now EMC consulting )... A brilliant blog I stumbled upon, again via High Scalability is AKF Partners . These guys specialise in consulting around site and application scalability and have a great blog on a variety of topics associated with building software including team composition, hiring and management, security, hardware, vendor negotiations, SOA, deployments, how to be a CTO! If you find that you need to up to date on IT concerns not directly technology related then this blog is a must read - they have some great thought provoking posts.

Hello everyone...er...anyone?! I'm dusting off the blog at last - and shocked to see my the last time I published was 6th Dec 2006.....oh gosh....oppps! I've been very busy working on rewriting the entire set of services for our Media delivery and licensing platform and integrating them with several large projects. I've finally surfaced from this and want to start sharing my knowledge and experience of the past year working on things such as.... Windows Media licensing (subscriptions, full licenses, revocation, generation) Type 1 Windows Media Player Online (Active) Stores ASP.NET as a service platform (http modules) Software design (Inversion of control, Dependency Injection, Spring.Net, Behaviour Driven Design) Business agility through software component design The future of Digital Media and general thoughts on where its all going and where technology fits in with it. I've started the ball rolling by updating my most popular blog post ( .Net custom configuration ) to...