Liam Symonds

Moving to Scotland: Why and How

Mon, 29 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

For over a decade my wife and I (and most recently our daughter) have been holidaying across the many regions of Scotland.

This year, after a few years of pondering and discussing, we’ve made the decision to change our lives and take the first major step towards realizing a dream by selling our house in the East of England, intentionally becoming homeless, and travelling to find our forever dream somewhere in the North East of Scotland.

Washing machine/tumbledryer notifications with Home Assistant

Mon, 28 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

What do you do when you have appliances housed in an external detached garage that you want notifying of upon their completion, yet they’re too old to be natively capable and you have a fervent dislike of manufacturer shipped IoT? You build your own with HomeAssistant (HA) and Zigbee devices, of course!

My washing machine and tumbledryer live a few steps away from my house in a detached garage to attempt to mask some of the whiney noise they generate and to make more room in my relatively small kitchen. Naturally, every time I put a load of washing on I either check it before it’s finished and forget about it or forget about it entirely until a few hours later.

About

Wed, 08 Jan 2025 12:00:00 +0000

I’m Liam. I’m a dad, husband, software engineer, avid DIYer and dog wrangler based in the (not so) sunny East of England.

I’ve been a developer professionally for over 13 years, writing code for close to 20 and have held numerous roles in industries ranging from leisure to finance to agriculture. I’m currently working as a Lead Software Engineer at a leading fintech in London.

My favourite thing to do is to learn, so you’ll find me reading, experimenting or creating whenever I get a moment away from the busy demands of family life.

Refreshing my home network with TP Link's Omada

Tue, 10 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I recently came to the realisation that my home network strategy was not working. Whilst running the stock ISP provided router/AP combo had worked fine for over a decade, my onboarding of more and more untrusted devices onto my network as well as the expansion of the network outside of my home’s four walls started to warrant an investment into better equipment.

My first thought was to try and survive with the basics: unmanaged switches and old router/AP combos running in access-point mode. This did work for a while, but I really struggled with getting roaming and bandwidth control to work nicely between the differently branded devices. In addition, I absolutely hated the lack of observability this solution provided.

On .NET and its slippery moat-ey roots

Tue, 21 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I can’t help but feel that .NET is slowly slipping back into its moated roots but in an open source fashion: documentation seems to prioritise mentioning Azure above all else; new application frameworks seem to be created with the sole purpose of promoting and coupling applications to Azure; successful open source libraries are being supplanted by Microsoft-owned alternatives; and a comparable non-proprietary LSP still hasn’t and isn’t likely to be released.

Legacy software or technical debt doesn't have to be a rewrite sentence

Mon, 19 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

How many times do you think a developer or development team has looked at some legacy or technical debt-laden software and exclaimed “this bollocks needs a complete rewrite!”? How many times do you think that same “complete rewrite” has led to disaster taking three, four, or more multiples of time than originally anticipated? I’d bet money on most. I’ve seen it happen. I’ve been in and led teams where it’s happened. It sucks for everyone involved.

We need to have a talk about making life easier for newcomers to the .NET ecosystem

Thu, 11 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

To those who have been living under an anti-Microsoft-news rock for the last few days, .NET 6 and all of its associated goodies have arrived, bringing with it C# 10, performance improvements and a boatload of new features.

Talk about .NET to anyone outside of the ecosystem (and some in it) and you’ll find they’re still confused by “what means what”, will ask “which version do I need” and will oft’ respond “is that the language you have to pay for the IDE to use?” to any news about it.

Your unit tests aren't as great as you think

Thu, 01 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Unit tests are tests that should test an individual section, or unit, within your code.

For a long time now, unit tests have been preached as the golden standard in most software development communities. They usually come hand in hand with another development concept: mocking. Mocking is where you ‘fake’ a dependency of the unit that you are testing, so you can test your unit in ‘isolation’.

I think the over-hyped importance of unit tests and mocking is a fallacy that is based on purism and idealism over pragmatism, realism and experience that often ends up biting you in the backside when you come to refactor only unit tested code.