As an individual developer working on a project, you have a very clear vision and understanding the work. The moment another developer joins, everything changes. You suddenly need to start working on shared understanding. The new developer needs to understands as much as you do and get the whole picture.
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Clients that need software built always want to know how much it will cost them, and a lot of times (at least as we have experienced at Intellectual Apps) they want to have this information before work begins. In order to get a “realistic” estimate of how much it will cost to build the piece of software, agencies would elicit the requirements and then based on that come up with an estimate of the cost. Client has a cost for getting their software built while the agency is happy they got the project. Great!
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This article is a summary of my presentation at the O’Reilly Software Architecture Conference in London. The Youtube video above is an explanation of some of the concepts in this article.
Maintaining an API gateway these days generally involves handling different types of user facing apps such as a web, mobile (of different platforms) and IOT devices. The Backend for Frontend (BFF) pattern specifically addresses this aspect of software solutions.
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We need to build ABC, so that our client can do 123. Developers nod their head in confirmation that they understand what needs to be done. Been there before?
Continue readingI was in New York on the 12th of April to deliver a talk at the O’Reilly software architecture conference on how my team and I built a report-casting mobile app for the 2015 Nigeria elections.On the surface, the talk was just about how we, as a team, built two mobile apps with a shared REST API running in the cloud. It was also about how we used an agile approach for the first time. In a real sense though, my talk was actually about how software development is inherently a social activity; the effect of corporate culture on software development (Conway’s law) and the pains associated with software development.
Continue readingWe had always wanted to build something relevant for elections in Nigeria and we had a lot of talk around this subject in 2011 when the last general elections in Nigeria were held but never did anything more than just talk about it. So when the 2015 elections were around the corner again, the talk came back but this time we were determined to get something done, anything!It all started with an excel sheet containing around 118,000 records, polling unit records from all across Nigeria. Since each polling unit record had a geographic coordinate, we were able to plot all the records on a map. Here is a map of Nigeria showing all the polling unit data (Google maps):
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