Agile Snowball

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Hi, I'm Richard Thombs

I'm a developer and have been ever since I got my first computer back in 1982 (a BBC model "A"). I've beaten Colossal Cave, dabbled in a bit of MUD and even helped email addresses change from ! to @.

Recent posts

  • Designing an asynchronous job processing system for long-running web jobs

    Often a website has to process a bulk task that will take too long to run synchronously. This describes one possible architecture for an asynchronous solution using a message queue.
    3/13/2021
  • How to highlight links to the active route in Next.js

    The <Link> component in Next.js doesn't include the ability to highlight links that point to the currently active route. Thankfully it is easy to create a component that does.
    3/5/2021
  • Looking back at the big changes in web development over the past 25 years

    I recently rewrote my blog using Next.js. Using one of the most modern frameworks, coupled with the retrospective nature of polishing my bio has crystallised just how far web development has come since I first typed in a URL back in the early 90s.
    3/4/2021

Projects

  • Retail Army
    A recruitment portal for field marketing companies.
  • Satis
    Quick and easy in-store customer satisfaction capture.
  • SCunpacked
    A Star Citizen data exploration tool.
Agile Snowball
Lessons learned and challenges faced while keeping an ASP.NET and SQL Server web application agile enough to take advantage of the latest tools, technologies and methodologies.
  • Richard Thombs
  • richard@gearstone.uk