Hey, Hi, Hello.

My name is Derek Graham and this is my personal blog.

I'm a software Solutions Architect working for a very popular business software company in the North East of England. I can't be sure that the opinions I have expressed here are my own so they definitely don't represent the views of my employer.

For the last few years I have been working mostly on .Net, React and Azure Cloud projects. I have been involved at almost every level of software development over the last 25+ years from individual contributor, leading a development team, management: of humans and projects, and spend a fair amount of time mentoring early-career software people. My experience ranges from real-time motion and process control in high reliability, 24-7 environments to commercial applications using .Net, Javascript and React, C & C++ as well as a wealth of other languages. I enjoy delivering simple, clean and maintainable code and the cleaning, refactoring and general "gardening" needed in bringing legacy systems back to a manageable state.

I co-organize NE Bytes, a monthly .Net community get-together hosted in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. I also speak at developer events and conferences like DDD North.

I am an Extreme Programmer, an Infrequent Sketchnoter, a Collector of Programming Languages, a Speaker, an Ensemble Programmer, and a Test-Driven Developer. I am a second year mentor for the "We Think Code" non-profit and a STEM ambassador specialising in micro:bit hackery.

My main areas of interest are in using agile methods to help improve what we ship, test-driven development, unit testing, continuous and deliberate learning, visual thinking, design and, of course, code.

A Note on Sharing

I've had a few requests from people wanting to use sketchnotes or graphics from my site for non-commercial uses. I try to make sure all posts that contain any "art" work are marked with a creative commons licence:

If you follow the link to creative commons, there is a section that describes what you can and cannot use the material for. In short:

Not part of the licence but I'd also really like it if you would let me know, by email or tweet, what you did with it or how it helped you.

Other Illustrations

You will notice some of the "hero" images on some posts are not drawn by me. They are from [Old Book Illustrations](http://www.oldbookillustrations.com/), a searchable site of public domain illustrations.

The information in the weblog, or blog, is provided "AS IS" with no warranties epressed or implied. Code may not compile if you do not keep up payments on it or fall into technical debt. No monads were harmed in the making of this blog.