Ian Nelson

“Ask Ian to come into a highly ambiguous space and he will quickly make sense of the chaos and find a way to bring order and deliver results. Ian is a brilliant collaboration partner. His team value his leadership style and this means everyone around him goes above and beyond to succeed in the mission.” — Fran Gillibrand — Product Manager, NHS England --- “The biggest problem with working with Ian F. Nelson is the Ian F. Nelson shaped hole he leaves behind. We’re going to have to use a patchwork of devs to make up for all the excellent work you’ve done here and your loss will be felt for some time to come. Good luck in your next role; keep in touch and we’ll see you around!”

“Ask Ian to come into a highly ambiguous space and he will quickly make sense of the chaos and find a way to bring order and deliver results. Ian is a brilliant collaboration partner. His team value his leadership style and this means everyone around him goes above and beyond to succeed in the mission.” — Fran Gillibrand — Product Manager, NHS England --- “I just wanted to take note of what an asset Ian is to the NHS App team.

Hello. I’m Ian. I’m a technical architect, occasional writer, reluctant leader, enthusiastic father, Wordle obsessive, and recovering Scrum sceptic. I’ve been building enterprise software systems for over 25 years — mostly in C# and Java, and frequently thinking about event-driven architecture, domain modelling, and how not to end up on the front page of the Daily Mail. These days I work with organisations that need someone to untangle their architecture, bring clarity to the chaos, and help their systems (and teams) talk to each other again. I like diagrams. I like distributed systems. I like it when the tests pass on the first go, but I’ve made peace with the fact they usually don’t.

Once more into the breach, dear friends. Six years since my navel-gazing online journal, why start a blog? For no better reason than I can, and it’s so easy now, and I really do need something to fill the void at ianfnelson.com. I vaguely considered writing my own blogging software in ASP.NET, but then I found .Text and realised that there was no point wasting my days reinventing the wheel – .Text is sufficiently open and customisable for my purposes. Besides, I have plenty other challenges to occupy my days – a rework of the Filthy Lucre Investment Club site, a site to host our wedding plans (not to mention actually planning the wedding!), Millie’s site, etc.

For months now, I’ve been desperate for a decent excuse to make a custom ASP.NET server control, so I was secretly pleased today when a CustomValidator originally coded for use on a single page was required elsewhere. It’s surprisingly easy to do, although it took me a while to find a decent example online, which eventually came courtesy of the 4GuysFromRolla. In my particular scenario, I needed to check that the text entered into a TextBox did not equal any of a selection of “banned” strings (which was available via a static property on another class).