IR35 – Off-payroll working through an intermediary With January and the self-assessment tax deadline rapidly approaching, this seems a good time to look at the off-payroll working rules – often known as IR35. There have been a lot of articles about IR35 recently and it’s impact on individual contractors, particularly within the public sector. This…
A few weeks ago, I was chatting with the guys in the office about the number of different messaging services there are: messenger, WhatsApp, Instagram, Skype etc, etc. I was bemoaning the fact that I had to download each one in order to be able to communicate with my friends because they all used a …
Builders, programmers, and the costs of rewriting software systems. I love a good builder analogy when it comes to software development. Often when talking to business stakeholders it is useful to use terms that they are familiar with and concepts they can easily grasp and are analogous to those we use in developing software. As…
As your company grows, your IT requirements change. You may find you need to integrate systems to improve efficiencies or develop bespoke software, and you may come to the point where you need to make use of the services of a specialist software developer. Perhaps you don’t have any software development or systems integration engineers…
.. talk to me about high availability and data recovery A few recent events have thrown into focus the ability for even large well established businesses to handle adverse IT events. Firstly, the recent British Airways outage had many experienced IT professionals scratching their heads. The outage was blamed on a power issue which was,…
One of the problems I have found when adopting an agile approach to developing systems (and I mean truly agile, according to the agilemanifesto.org rules, rather than a particular project management methodology), is that the high level of end user interaction in the development process can sometimes lead to the users, in effect, designing the…
What is open source software (OS Software)? OS Software is software with a source code that has been publicly distributed for other programmers to access, use and learn from, meaning that anyone can inspect, modify and enhance the software. Because of this, open source software is generally considered to be more stable, more secure and…