I am a software engineer based in Melbourne, Australia. I have worked in the software industry for more than 10 years, mostly as “a consultant”. What does that mean? … not much. I’ve work in most parts of the SDLC, as a BA, designer, developer, tester and as one of those guys that doesn’t really have a role but needs to be there anyway. I’ve seen projects go from inception to dismay and then onto mediocre implementation (and sometimes to happy implementation) and into maintenance.

I wrote my first line of code when I was 8 in BASIC and have moved through Pascal, C, assembler, C++, Java, PL/SQL and many other languages. I currently call Java home.

I remain healthily skeptical of silver bullets, which seem to appear at regular intervals and would describe my approach to development as “pragmatic”.

The answer to most questions development (and indeed most questions) is “It depends!” – while standards, frameworks, design patterns and methodologies can be great tools, people that understand when and why to apply them are even better. Every situation is different, and the answer is always “it depends” – that’s the pragmatic style.

[and yes, I am aware of the pragmatic bookshelf which incidentally, are great books.]