A milestone at Method4!

It's hard to believe that 10 years has passed since Apple released its revolutionary iPhone smartphone, Amazon launched the Kindle and people were joining Facebook in their droves. It was also the year I started my career at Method4 - how time flies!

In that time, I've had the privilege of working with a fantastic team developing high-quality bespoke software solutions. I've experienced all aspects of the software development lifecycle; from working with clients during initial analysis and design, to developing, testing and supporting applications. I was even lucky enough to attend the Microsoft Ignite 2016 event in Atlanta to learn more about the latest Microsoft products.

I've enjoyed working with a variety of technologies, primarily developing web applications based on the popular and reliable Microsoft .NET framework, often with a SQL Server database back-end. Every application is different and this always presents interesting challenges and the fast pace of the industry means that I'm always learning something new.

Perhaps the biggest change that I've experienced in the last 10 years is the recent surge in popularity of the cloud computing service Microsoft Azure. More and more of our clients are requesting that their applications are hosted in the cloud. Doing so results in significant cost savings over traditional hosting alternatives and simplifies previously complex processes such as scalability and disaster recovery.

We also find that a common requirement for web applications is to achieve single sign-on, to make things easier for users.  Azure Active Directory allows us to create web applications that can authenticate users using existing accounts, even if those accounts are currently managed in Active Directory on-premise.

For the developer, Azure makes unit testing, load testing and deployment easy; largely thanks to its tight integration with Visual Studio - our go-to Integrated Development Environment (IDE). Rapid deployment in particular is vital, especially as most of our projects now run according to agile methodologies such as Scrum that require regular software release with minimal overhead.

10 years in the industry is something of a milestone, and it feels an appropriate time to thank Method4 for a valuable and enjoyable career.