What we need is someone to do kids’ songs that rock…

People always say that you never know how much having children will change your life until you finally have them, and that’s definitely true! We were expecting a certain amount of upheaval, but we definitely under-estimated quite how much of our strength would be taken up with just getting used to having this little blessing with us. I’d actually been optimistically talking with my boss about working from home in the first couple of weeks after the baby arrived, but he suggested that I might not actually be aware of how much having a baby takes it out of you in the start. He was right

It’s totally worth it though! She’s only been back home with us for a day or so, but it’s already tough to imagine life without her. Having Mummy next to me with Baby in arms singing and cooing over her is just the best thing in this world. Not to mention when Baby grabs hold of my finger, or opens her eyes so wide and just stares up – well, these things are just beyond this world!

Not too sure how often I’ll get to blog going forward – I think any spare moments for the next couple of weeks are likely to be spent on afternoon naps than anything else – but there’ll definitely be more from this new Daddy as life goes on with Mummy and Baby.

The most chuckle-worthy is command #5, “Write every commit message like the next person who reads it is an axe-wielding maniac who knows where you live.” I chuckled to myself when reading that, before remembering that all too often that axe-wielding murderer is me three months down the line, wondering why I didn’t write a better commit message so that I’d remember what on earth it was I did! Don’t forget that comments and commit messages are just as much for your benefit as your colleagues, so it will pay to put the extra 5 minutes of effort in to write a detailed and meaningful message. If you’re not doing this, you might as well just grab any old message from whatthecommit.com for all the good it’ll do you further down the line

While I can’t claim I’ve always obeyed these commandments, I think the only one I’m failing on these days is that the various databases I work with aren’t being source-controlled, but that’s on my radar to sort out over the next couple of months.

Long story short, we’re now in the month of our due date. Our midwife pointed out yesterday that we can finally start saying “Our baby arrives this month”, which feels an awful lot closer than than the 5 weeks we were talking about just a short time ago! I guess it could still be proved wrong, because our little one could always arrive later than planned,  but we’re actually more concerned that the birth could happen earlier than scheduled. So the last couple of months have been getting ourselves ready.

Thanks to the kindness of family/friends and the genius of Freecycle we’ve got enough clothes to last the first 18 months or so. The hospital bags for mum and baby are packed. The nursery is ready, and with less than 31 days to go, we’re just waiting for labour to start so that we can welcome our little one into our home.

After that, it’ll all be plain sailing, right?

As a team building on Azure, we’ve been designing our system to use Azure Table Storage and have been doing our best to get our heads around how to persist in non-relational ways in this NoSQL world we’ve stumbled into. We thought we’d done quite well in designing our entities, but then actually had to use some of our initial code – to say it was slow is probably an understatement! It was clear that we might not have designed things in a way that uses Table Storage at it’s best, so we planned out a refactor task for early this week to denormalise our structures. We’d also planned out a research task to look into CQRS, which I cracked on with first thing this morning.

I’ve been reading resources recommended by Rinat Abdullin on his CQRS Starting Page, and things have slowly been coming together. In particular, some documents published at CQRSinfo.com have really helped.

I’m still just getting my head around things, but it’s looking to me like we might not have got our entity design wrong after all. I think the problem is more that our architecture is using the same set of code for Commands as for Queries. I’ll be re-architecting things a bit more this afternoon.

Have to say that the Azure Platform is really going to help with this refactoring. It’s able to use relational data (SQL Azure), has NoSQL-style persistence (Azure Table Storage and Blob Storage), and has support for processing commands asynchronously built-in in the form of Queue Storage. It almost (almost ) makes implementing CQRS seem trivial. No doubt there’ll be another post eating my words in the next couple of days or so!

I’ve been doing a bit of a professional re-assessment recently. In many ways, my first few roles after uni have been very good for me. I’ve grown from a graduate with no commercial experience, through a Junior role and quickly moving into mid-grade development positions. In retrospect, I’ve probably always been a solid developer with skills covering front-end development, business logic coding and database development. That particular combination of skills is all-too-rare as I’ve often found in trying to interview for my replacement in previous jobs, but my self-perception was always that I was a front-end coder first and foremost.

My last role did an awful lot to bulk up my skill-set. I was a sole developer in a web startup company, basically responsible for all coding, design, sysadmin and maintenance tasks. Whereas before this role I might have avoided touching too much server-side code, this role forced me to learn that side of the business because there was no-one else to do it! Thanks in large part to working there, it’s safe to say I’m a much more confident and competent developer than I was 18 months ago.

I’ve now left that role, and am four weeks into a role with another startup called Connectegrity. This is very exciting because it’s completely greenfield development – there wasn’t even a source code versioning system settled upon, let alone a repository configured that has some source code inside it! These last two weeks have seen me able to start playing and plotting how to use various tools and technologies I’ve had on my radar for such a long time, but just had no time to actually get some experience with:

• Inversion of Control, Dependency Injection
• MVC3
• Distributed VCS (e.g. Mercurial, Git, Bazaar)
• Test-Driven Development (or at least test-first development)
• Automated Builds and Continuous Integration (via TeamCity)
• Domain-Driven Design
• Windows Azure and cloud-based computing
• NoSQL-based data persistence (via Azure Table Storage)
• Researching and architecting with some of the modern patterns e.g. CQRS
• Integrating StyleCop into our build process to enforce documentation and code styling

We’ve now started building the new project using the above set of tools, and there’s an *awful* lot of learning both done and coming up. This blog has really been created to share some of the knowledge, document processes we’ve gone through and generally geek out a bit to a not-so-captive audience

Hopefully some of it will be useful, some of it will be interesting and at least some of it will be read!

I just feel utterly helpless with each fresh wave of nausea. We can be talking normally, and then suddenly that look comes and I know she’s going to have to run off again. I just wish there was something practical i could do – being a man, obviously it is my God-given task to fix it! The best I can do is keep reminding us that morning sickness is a good sign, and that it is stabilising the baby. That helps, and I know when we’re holding our baby, it’ll be totally worth it!

Still, it’s made me think a bit – mums really do suffer for their children! As a bloke I don’t think I ever appreciated exactly what mums go through. Obviously I’m never going to experience nausea due to pregnancy, but seeing it firsthand in the woman I love is giving me a glimpse and an inkling of how motherhood has to start much earlier than fatherhood. All of which is to say, big love and respect to my wife who is already caring for our little one!

As for fatherhood, thinking again, I guess I’m already doing it because every time I care for my wife, I’m also caring for our baby. What’s more, I get to pray and ask our Father to look after all three of us, which is very cool

We’re enjoying the journey of adjusting our thoughts of what life would hold over the couple of years. As I said before, kids were always on our agenda, but we’d not been thinking of having them immediately. We’re settling in to the idea that our family is starting a bit earlier than planned, and we’re totally into it now!

I’m finding that the paternal instincts are kicking in – if anything, I might be being a bit over-protective of my lovely wife and the baby growing a bit bigger every day. There’s a fine line between healthy care, and over-bearing dictatorship, and I’m just praying that God will always keep me on the right side of that line! My wife is accepting it well though. It helps that all we both want is for our little addition to keep on growing healthily and normally

My darling wife (DW) had been feeling a bit funny for a few days, and we were waiting patiently for her period to arrive. It was a couple of days late, but we weren’t too worried as this has happened a couple of times before. Over the weekend, we went to a friend’s dedication ceremony for their child, and one of the people praying was pregnant which made DW think “Oh, I really do want to be pregnant!” We talked about that, laughed it off, and got on with our plan to think about having kids in 2012 or so.

A few days ago I was travelling away from home on business, and waiting patiently for the train in Derby, I got a phone call from DW. Hesitantly, quietly, she told me that she had gone and bought two pregnancy tests, and they were positive. I was a bit quiet, trying to work out if this was a practical joke or not. Finally, deciding that it wasn’t, I said “OK…” Not the most eloquent, or reassuring, of responses, but I quickly leaped into action to say all the right things. After the shock had worn off, it started to sink in and the joy started to rise!

We have always been firm believers that there is no such thing as an accidental pregnancy. As Christians, we believe that God is intimately involved in the creation of every child, and without Him no pregnancy would happen. Although we’ve made the choice to use contraception in our marriage, we’ve always said that God is in charge of when we have children, and we’ll be happy if He does so. So, while this is definitely a surprise, it is a welcome one!

The fun thing now is to look back and see all the ways that God has sovereignly prepared us for this. From little things like the recent conversations we’ve had about which baby names we like, to the way we never quite found time to dye my wife’s hair before our recent 1st anniversary celebration (which is apparently bad to do when a woman is pregnant. It got really fun when we found out that He has revealed our pregnancy to various people to help us understand that this really is His plan. The first person was my sister, who has a bit of a habit of having a prophetic sense about situations. She said that there were a couple of times over the last two months where she has had moments of thinking “Oh, they’re going to have a baby soon!”. The other person was my wife’s boss, who felt God say to her last week that my wife is pregnant, but had just been writing it off as a silly thought she had.

I’m loving how God is all over this, and that we can totally trust Him to carry on doing so! The rest of this blog will be about my adventures in both impending and actual fatherhood. I hope it’s entertaining, encouraging and maybe even a little bit informative