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 job applications. We

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 “ FlyAway