Part of the Process

Brighton Sea front frosted 2 I didn't anticipate quite so many examples   to my December blog post  on disruption and communication  so soon.  As a follow up I'd like to briefly mention some of these,  ranging from at best inconvenient and stressful experiences  to the frightening and life taking. Taking the first and the seeming inability of the British rail system to cope with our seasons. They suffer with trust and respect as a lot of the people using the system for holiday travel are also regular commuters. Indeed my Facebook feed has a number of people complaining that they have to put up with this all year round.  With the scenes at Finsbury Park and the snow closing  Liverpool’s John Lennon Airport and Leeds Bradford International airport , it's got to have a knock on with passenger trust and with the relatively trivial nature of the impact there isn't much opportunity for the companies involved to show respect. Apart from ma...

I don't usual write about my workplace directly on social media or this blog. But today I'm just going to briefly touch on some of what makes it a good place to work for me. Basically for me a good work place always boils down to two things 1) the people and 2) a general sense of inquisitiveness. Working Late by Thomas Høyrup Christensen I work for 15below a software development company that specialises in the travel industry. It's fair to say we are probably market leaders in the kind of workflow driven notifications that we do. We have internal tools that started for a particular business need and are now side projects such as Gallifrey, what I love watching here is how is allows people to play with techniques that aren't always useful in the day job - such as click once deployment in github We also have internal tools, which are part of say our build chain, that get open sourced - such as the aptly named  Build.Tools  or fixes to how packaging works in...

Beach Snowman Xmas cards available As the festive season gets into full swing, I am glad that I am not reliant on using mass public transport before I can relax and enjoy myself this year. Especially after reading the news this morning - predicting rail disruption caused by  floods in the mild weather .  For around the past decade my day job has involved helping travel companies in passenger communications; as distilled into these top tips of  The 3 Big Ideas In Managing Passenger Disruption  or in  Managing Travel Disruption  that looks at more crisis orientated passenger communications. [edit: these links are now dead, more up-to-date take on  Disruption management: Your opportunity to impress  or  Travel Disruption Management: Tech Opportunities in the Travel Industry ] But from the small journeys that I have taken in the past week, whether by bus or train, one takeaway has been that small delays can be frustrating when you don't k...

fishbowl jump by Kay Kim A few days ago Timehop popped up a link to Brighton: The UK's Silicon Valley or Just a Feeder City for London? that was written a year ago and the situation has changed that much (although 15below could be another name to go with Brandwatch! ;-)) The story laid out was quite familiar, very few of my friends at university stayed in the area though and I moved out for 4 years getting experience in ... you guessed it in London! It also chimes in with the effects of innovation systems talked about in the book Get off the Grass: Kickstarting New Zealand’s Innovation Economy by Shaun Hendy and Paul Callaghan. In Chapter 3 of Get off the Grass the authors tell the story of the origin of Silicon Valley and how agglomeration had made it successful, this area previously had an industry manufacturing valves that had powered electrical circuits before transistors. The story of Silicon Valley nicely illustrates the three key aspects of the a...