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James McKay
Personal blog · jamesmckay.netprogramming
James McKay writes james mckay dot net, a personal blog at jamesmckay.net about programming. Since 2012, 7 different Hacker News readers have linked it 10 times. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-24, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (4) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link James McKay's blog for software engineering practice posts, including a critique of n-tier/3-layer architecture, a critique of Martin Fowler on feature branches, keeping engineering notebooks, and OWIN/Katana.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 4 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
because there are few things that are less logical than business logic
What Hacker News says?
One point to note here: OWIN and Katana are two separate components. OWIN is the community-driven underlying abstraction layer which doesn't specify any dependencies; Katana is a Microsoft-driven library of statically typed wrappers around it that completely abstracts it out altogether and leaves you with a bunch of tutorials and blog posts that don't look anything even remotely like the OWIN spec. It's all very con…
Comment linking /2014/08/sorting-out-the-confusion-that-is-owin-katana-and-iappbuilder/
on “WCF is Open Source”Submitted Check-in before code review is an antipattern as a story · 51 points
HN discussionMy apologies :) Incidentally I wrote a whole series of blog posts a while ago where I cast a critical eye over the whole n-tier/3-layer architecture and explained why it isn't all that it's made out to be. https://jamesmckay.net/category/n-tier-deconstructed/
Comment linking /category/n-tier-deconstructed/
on “The Lava Layer Anti-Pattern (2014)”Submitted Why does Martin Fowler not understand feature branches as a story · 23 points
HN discussionHi, author here. As other commenters have noted, this post is seven years old. My position on feature branches has evolved (and softened somewhat as well) in the meantime. I posted an update about 18 months ago: https://jamesmckay.net/2017/01/martin-fowler-and-feature-bra...
Comment linking /2017/01/martin-fowler-and-feature-branches-revisited/
on “Why does Martin Fowler not understand feature branches?”Submitted Why does Martin Fowler not understand feature branches? as a story · 21 points
HN discussionWrite down whatever helps you. Sounds like your approach works for you. Here's a similar post with more concrete advice on what to write: https://jamesmckay.net/2017/02/how-to-keep-lab-notes-as-a-so... 1. Choose the most low-friction solution you can get your hands on. 2. Write down everything you do, as you do it. 3. You can not be too detailed. 4. Write down your train of thought when you’re planning and designing…
Comment linking /2017/02/how-to-keep-lab-notes-as-a-software-developer/
on “Using an Engineering Notebook”Submitted You can no longer afford not to take Git seriously as a story · 16 points
HN discussionSubmitted Check-in before code review is an antipattern as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Why you should use a general purpose scripting language for build scripts (2014) as a story · 3 points
HN discussion