scottabutler Goto Github PK

I'm Scott, a senior software developer based in Melbourne, currently working at PageUp.

Check out my LinkedIn and some of my side projects.

I enjoy working as part of a team to get things done, creating functionality that makes peoples lives easier. I'm a pretty organised person, you won't find me too far from a spreadsheet! My main motivators are working with a great team, feeling productive and building high quality, useful products.

As for tools and tech, I enjoy using C#, ASP.NET MVC and Razor in tandem with UI tools and frameworks (such as the PageUp GEL and Bootstrap utility classes) as I find them efficient to work with, meaning we can validate what we're building sooner.

More recently though, I've also enjoyed working with TypeScript and React, as it allows us to do a bunch of things client-side a lot more easily than a traditional MVC stack (such as partial page updates, client-side routing and so on).

I've also spent a lot of time working with AWS, leveraging many of their services to create software that scales. Scalability is a key part of the SaaS model and in my experience, the more we can lean on managed services like DynamoDB, SQS and Lambda (for lighter workloads) and Application Load Balancers, Autoscaling Groups and Fargate (for heavier tasks), the less time we spend on maintenance effort.

AWS services I have experience with include: EC2, ECS, ECR, IAM, KMS, SSM, S3, DynamoDB, CloudWatch, SNS, SQS, Route53 and Lambda.

I actively promote immutability and validation practices within my team. Having spent some time learning about functional programming, it showed me that even in languages like C#, using practices like immutability can make your code so much more resilient and reliable. That said, being pragmatic about this is key to getting people on board with this practice. Even small things like using constructors to initialise your POCOs and making their properties read-only is a really simple way to get started.

Having code that self-validates and "makes invalid state impossible" is also really worthwhile. Extending slightly on the constructor initialisation approach to add in a little validation means that any time you've successfully managed to construct that object, you know it's valid and won't cause problems later on in your code.