Scott Davey

I am a software developer based in Suffolk. I graduated in Computer Science with both a bachelor’s (2015) and a master’s (2016) degree from the University of Essex.

I would describe myself as a software developer, though I don’t see myself tied to any specific language or framework. I’ve always been a generalist and have countless examples where I’ve picked up new tech quickly in order to complete a project.

Why do I Write Software?

My passion for programming started at sixth form college as part of my Computing A-level, we were taught to program in Python. I ended up getting hooked on programming which led to it filling up most of my free time.

Then came along Battlefield Heroes which was a game I used to play at the time. I used to host a server, these servers had a protocol that you could use to issue commands for example to kick players or send messages. For a period of 2-3 years my projects generally revolved around this game; I created tools for these servers which then added all kinds of wacky features. This eventually grew into a community project to solve a completely different problem that impacted hundreds of servers.

Part of the fun is ‘building things’, the other part is the infinite amount of problems that exist in software engineering. No project I’ve ever done or seen is perfect, but it’s that endless pursuit of making things better that I enjoy.

Agile

The way we work as a team can have a much bigger effect on the product than the tech stack or which cloud provider we choose to use. I’m not one of those developers that likes to be locked in a room for weeks on end coding away; I value collaboration and being part of a high performing team much more.

I wasn’t always interested in agile, agile was a ‘process’ that I merely followed. I was sent on a Scrum Master training course and since then I’ve been heavily interested in ‘agile’ (or I should say being agile).

Engineering Practices

We value code that is easy to maintain over code that is easy to write. (Growing Object-Oriented Software By Tests - Steve Freeman, Nat Pryce)

I’m on a bit of a mission to get rid of the endless excuse raised in code reviews: ‘but it works’.

‘It works’ isn’t good enough to deliver quality software consistently and at pace. I practice TDD professionally and value practices like refactoring, pair programming and continuous integration. It shouldn’t be much of a surprise that out of all the agile methods Extreme Programming (XP) is the one I most closely relate to.

Contact Details

If you wish to contact me then feel free to email me scottdavey@hey.com or message me on LinkedIn.