Part of the Process

2020 has been a strange work year, it has exposed some underlying issues such as benefits of remote working. Here I take a look at a couple of practices that I think 2020 has shown some clarity. Impact of 100% utilisation Photo by Elena Mozhvilo on Unsplash One thing that really became clear was how 100% utilisation impacts team work. I think this creates an organisational bias towards individual contributions, unilateral decision making, and knowledge silos vs team work, collaboration, and shared understanding. This is due to overlapping free time in the team reducing as you have other constraints, such as reduced working hours, and other unexpected work. That being said Rich Mironov has some warnings around what happens when you think " We [should] keep some overflow engineering capacity for emergencies. ". The tiny fix example he gives is IME usually a signal for a bit of an outsized time sink, due to the knock on effects it can have in the product due to increasing testi...

During normal life finding time and energy for side projects can be tough, with the strange events caused by the Coronavirus it can be even harder. A short update on what we've done so far this year.  This is  part of a series  about my side project  Bashfully , which aims to give graduates and other new entrants to careers a seasoned professional level way of expressing themselves, through the super power of story telling. Following the core principles of being discoverable, personalised and guiding in approach. Adding remote jobs With more people working from home, and liking it, we thought it would be good to boost the links on our resources page to include more remote working options. This was a quick reaction to Coronavirus and the changes of the working world. It also prompted a bit of a look at the resources with some updates and tweaks. Job application tracker The next bit we tackled was a feature inspired by a tweet about using a spreadsheet to track j...

No-code has been a dream of some companies for a while, so I thought I'd go beyond the hype and test drive some of the tools.   This was a gap in my 2018 post  Tools to help your start-up in starting up , so an update of sorts. This post was prompted by coming across this great summary  🤖 No-Code - Unleashing Creativity on the Internet  and I'd say most of them are still at the stage of "low code" to be truly useful. Also there are a lot of flame wars across the internet about what is a "proper language" to write software in, so in the spirit of this tweet about PHP ... It also drives home something techbros hate to admit: your users don’t care what you build your app with, they care that it works the way they want it too — Chris Hartjes (@grmpyprogrammer) December 1, 2020 ... make things that work they way people want them to and don't worry about your stack! (too much :-) Webflow/.bubble/WiX site builders These tools are really easy to get a small we...

With voice fast becoming a major communication channel for consumers, we decided to put it to the test within our   notifications technology The development experience Amazon know how to write good APIs. Application Programmable Interface - These are the function calls that services provide so that developers can interact with them. The ir scripting made using their voice services very simple. Google Home has a very similar set of APIs , so our pilot was easily replicable with that family of devices as well. Overall our developers were amazed about how easy it was to integrate into out application , although that was also down to our channel agnostic architecture designed to be future proof. The User Experience There were a few issues we discovered with the Alexa voice processing. For example, here in the UK it’s common to talk about flight number s like “ZZ1234” . Alexa had a hard time picking up letters spelt out. Saying “ FlyAway Airlines 1234” or just “1234” since “ FlyA...

It's a well known phrase with software developers that "naming things is hard", but what about hardware products? What are the worst offenders and how should it be done?  This post was prompted by a couple of social media posts, taking a look at two culprits. The first was camera model names Whoever designed the Canon's camera naming schema deserves a good talking to. Impossible to know what's newer/better, and all the models have multiple names across the world, making searching for info really hard. — Ben Sauer (@bensauer) August 5, 2020 and this one humorously takes a peek at how monitors get their names View this post on Instagram How companies name their Monitors 😂 Via @system32comics Follow @techgang_ for more . . #programmerhumor #gamersofinstagram #gamersunite #gamerslife #programmerlife #codinglife #programming #programmingmemes #codingmemes #computerscience #programmingjokes #computerengineering #workfromhomelife #gamerlife #ga...

Some history and thoughts on the streaming/content eco-system as I get Apple TV+ and Disney+ in full 4K glory! And a mini-review of sorts of the Roku Premiere. This week I purchased a Roku Premiere player. The Roku system has an interesting history. It started out as a Netflix project , and is now one of the widely supported platforms. Other content providers like Sky have even re-badged them for their streaming set top boxes. Building infrastructure It feels like we are entering a new phase of the on-demand television journey. There are two aspects that are required for digital delivery - processing power and network capacity. I remember upgrading my old 486 PC in 1996 to a Cyrix 5x86 - and for the first time had something that could decode and play MPEG movies with respectable quality. Of course dial up internet at that time was painfully slow! So everything had to be delivered physically. Not long after WebTV appeared, but even with Microsoft buying it and re-branding as MSN TV...

I have recently begun a new chapter of my life in  #travelte ch  - and I’m still excited to be joining  Jamal Whorms-MonDésir  and  Andrew Diggle  as co-founders and part of the flamboyance🦩 at  WayFare  🛫 The "Jetscape Navigator" of the team ;-) In a lot of ways it’s continuing the same long term mission as  15below  in improving  #paxex  and  #cx , making travel systems suck a little less. However, the move from B2B to B2C opens up new ways of fulfilling that. There is so much we can do in the search, inspiration, and booking spaces to make things easier and more social Trying to avoid the cliched phrases of unprecedented times and new normal , there are two aspects that need to be addressed in getting people back flying - 1) minimising the physical risk to passengers' health and 2) financial risk from cancellations. We are looking at how we can use layaway for the airfare portion to help alleviate the financial i...

First day of a new conference - SofaConf 2020 "A stay-at-home conference"  - that came about in reaction to COVID-19 and lockdown/travel restrictions. Overall very good content so far, lots of sessions that speak to real issues in doing product development in the real world. Slight technical issue with quality of Andy Budd's broadcast that was quickly sorted. The Secret Weapon to Finding Focus - Melissa Perri Melissa explained the build trap, where features are not seen as "what is the business value I want to provide" but rather "here are some features we want as  output". Netflix realised that they were in the build trap with Roku, and getting into competition with hardware companies that they could partner with. So they spun it out and so that they could then double down on their core competency. Now is the time to focus, what can we do to win? .... first you need a good product Strategy framework. alignment builds autonomous teams. The right level ...

Last week was the briefing webinar for the ThoughtWorks Technology Radar. Like many of us, this was the first time they had gone through a process remotely which appeared as the pun/theme "the elephant in the zoom". It is interesting to hear from experts in specific technology areas discuss the latest trends and techniques. This time I was struck by the story behind how the Tech Radar came about.  It didn't start as a external "thought leadership" or sales device, It was a reaction to business growth and internal knowledge management issues. I think it's the bi-directional process of the teams feeding in the ideas, the advisory board then collating and debating them to pull out patterns and asses the different maturity levels makes it powerful. Also this is based on actual experience from their projects, rather than desk analysis that you might get from a report like Gartners. They also offer advice on how to make your own , which is great to get people sha...

Setting up a "workflow" or an organisation to your work, is a key part of moving from a beginner to immediate kill and above. So a bit about my photography workflow since I am slowly retiring my old Mac Mini and OSX Snow Leopard and moving to an old Windows 10 desktop. Just before COVID-19 turned the world upside down I had also got a new camera not supported by any of the RAW converters I was using.  Shooting For my veteran Canon 450D I have a couple of styles setup from Cinescopophilia shooting RAW + JPEG. I have in the past sometimes shot RAW only, but it was a pain if software didn't support it. But now even my phone can process the CR2 RAW files! On my X100 and X-T100 mirrorless cameras I have started to try and follow the tips from In Camera: Perfect Pictures Straight Out of the Camera by Gordon Laing  with general settings from  Fredrik Averpil and Film simulation settings on Fuji Weekly The X100 is also another veteran now, but being a premium camera when...