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Welcome to the blog and web site of Ashley Davis

Software craftsman, technologist and author

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Contracting

I'm available for consulting and contracting work.

I can you help with the following:

  • Quickly building MVPs for startups
  • Understanding how to get the most out of technology for business
  • Developing technical strategies
  • Management and coaching of teams & projects
  • Microservices, devops, continous delivery, mobile and fullstack software development

Please reach out to me

My books

Rapid Fullstack Development

I'm writing a new book: Rapid Fullstack Development

Learn the tricks of the trade for writing reliable and valuable code, quickly, and across the entire stack.

The early access program is open! Support this work, be involved in the books development and get a massive discount for getting onboard early:
https://rapidfullstackdevelopment.com/

Bootstrapping Microservices

My second book, Bootstrapping Microservices with Docker, Kubernetes and Terraform, is a practical and project-based guide to building distributed applications with microservices. Bootstrapping Microservices has a second edition!

Data Wrangling with JavaScript

My first book Data Wrangling with JavaScript is a comprehensive overview of working with data in JavaScript.

Background

In recent years I have focused on building fullstack and distributed applications, but I have a long history in software development with many years in apps, web apps, backends, serious games, simulations and VR. I make technology work for business. I architect and build bespoke software solutions that span multiple platforms.

I manage development teams, prepare technical strategies and architect software products. I explain complicated technology to senior management. I have delivered cutting-edge products in fast-paced and high-pressure environments. I know how to focus and prioritize to get the important things done.

I am a passionate technologist and agile practitioner. I rarely do TDD now, but many years of practicing TDD has changed me. I now think testing first even when I'm not doing TDD and even when I'm not doing any automated testing! A process I affectionally call manual TDD. Although I've never taken up a functional language professionally, I'm a fan of functional programming principles (applied to imperitive languages) because of the potential for predictability, reliability, testability & concurrency.

Please find me on LinkedIn for my full history.

Public speaking

In January 2020 I spoke at the Microservices Conference in Ankara, Turkey.

I'm a regular speaker at meetups and other organisations, click here to see some of my talks for BrisJS.

I've appeared on the following podcasts:

See my YouTube channel many more talks, presentations and coding livestreams.

Open-source

I have plenty of open-source code available on my personal Github, the Data-Forge org, the Grademark org, Task-Mule MiniQL and Data-Forge Notebook.

Data-Forge is my open-source data transformation and analysis toolkit for JavaScript/TypeScript. It is inspired by Pandas and LINQ and is my goto tool for slicing and dicing data.

Datakit is the simpler and easier to use successor to Data-Forge for working with data in JavaScript, TypeScript and at the command line. It's work in progress, but already proving to be very useful.

Data-Forge Notebook is my notebook-style desktop app for data analysis, transformation and visualization in JavaScript and TypeScript (kind of like an IDE for working with data). Delivered to 200+ customers on Windows, MacOS and Linux. My first indie application! Check out the video.

Articles

I write to share my experience of working on commercial and open-source projects. I have a continuing interest in improving my skills and building my toolkit, but not only that, I like helping others build their own experience.

My assorted blog posts are now mostly collected under the Code Capers banner.

I've written blog posts for Log Rocket, App Signal and InfoQ.

Scaling microservices on Kubernetes was published on the Linux Foundation blog.

See all my old stuff on Code Project.

My first article is still live! Even after all the years. Dynamic 2D Imposters: A Simple, Efficient DirectX 9 Implementation

Industry groups

I founded Game Dev Brisbane and Game Tech Brisbane and continued to organise them for 5 years.

I organised Brisbane Unity Developers for multiple years.

Contact

Need help with development? Want to talk tech?

Please reach out:

Support my work

You can support my work in any of the following ways: