angrymouse

What do you think the good ones do? And how do they set direction in a way that’s good compared to a bad one?

Right in the middle of a retiring of a big external platform and moving it over, slice by slice into separate company owned products and APIs (and a few off the shelf things mixed in too!)

I think there’s plenty of sensible advice about getting a technical person with experience and expertise to help make the right decision. Between doing it yourself, building a platform with various tools stitched together to finding ways of getting what you need from existing suppliers and other tooling.

Something I would also suggest is to be really clear right now on how you currently work, how your existing platform works and the problems it’s causing or at least the opportunities you feel you’re missing out on.

To do this suggest getting a “discovery” team together and doing some service design and analysis to map out your user flows, business and tech. The as-is. and laying against that all the pain points and missed opportunities.

Then using the same team to help you craft how it should work. The to-be vision.

Then using that to-be vision and the insight and expertise you’ve developed to help you decide how best to get to that to-be vision. As cheaply and sustainably as possible.

Part of the organisation I’m helping out. There’s a vast difference between the parts where that discovery work was done (and done with clear purpose) and the bits that haven’t been done. And the endless delay and struggle they’ve had.

Hah. Good catch and fixed

But is the user story format the best way to get those common pain points or behaviours out front and centre?

It’s important to know what they are. But the format you use to describe them can change a lot in how you even understand people and what’s going wrong.

And the why is so important in knowing why someone’s dropping out of a journey, not clicking a thing etc

Im sure the team would welcome issues and pull requests on GitHub

I’ve recently resigned and will be looking for something new in the new year.

My reasons are:

- done this for a while. Being on COVID projects gave me a taste of different but similar

- was surrounded by talented and some not so talented contractors making silly money whilst I was the only permanent employee making probably half. That wasn’t different but the noise got louder in my head. Why not you? Was the question in my head as I rapidly rose to lead a team of 14

- remote work. One of the things holding me back was worrying (unnecessarily) about having to go to strange places to do contract work. But my role did that already before COVID and since COVID so much more opportunity to do things remote means the size of the pond is bigger

- A colleague did it. Someone I mentor. And they grew and got stretched so much by new contexts in new projects. It reminded me of that feeling i got from the COVID projects. Purpose and being stretched to learn new stuff

The vaccination rollout programme is very much NHS. Vaccination is something the NHS does. So that shouldn’t be surprising.

Believe Cummings point was that The Department of Health wasn’t in control as it is in terms of test and trace. So NHS + Cabinet office (and not DHSC’s normal red tape, funding models) = success.

However, I think “sources” in the vaccination task force have said Cummings is full of it.

This brings back memories.

Used to work for an NHS hospital trust.

The chief executive made a rather rash, very public announcement (under peer pressure) that he was going to do a skydive for the hospital charity.

Lots of jokes etc.

But he was going to do it.

Until our chief medical director took him aside and told him about the injury rate and how they actually cost the NHS more.

Though a few people from the charity brought it up, it was politely forgotten about. And he did a walk around the peak district instead

Having redesigned a hospital's recruitment process to use Facebook advertising for the more "blue collar" type jobs (porters, support workers, estates type jobs as well as nurses) I can really see this working.

We got ridiculous traction in the local area. We were reaching people who had never really thought of a career at their local hospital. But a hospital isn't just doctors.

Often with Facebook we didn't actually directly hit the candidate either. People's mum, uncle, brother or friend would find the advert and pass it on.

Facebook is already successful in recruitment. Only makes sense they really target this market and provide the business tools to do it

It is a touch hacky but here it is: https://grillopress.github.io

Code here:

https://github.com/GrilloPress/grillopress.github.io?files=1

The idea behind my blog is every major article I style slightly differently.

Have an upcoming design kanban one where I've played about a bit more with grids to create the boards

I recently converted my blog to CSS grid.

In the past I would have lazily used bootstrap as I've used that for over three years and know the grid inside out.

It was a touch intimidating at first. No framework!

But it is really quite expressive. It took me 12 lines of CSS to get a traditional blog layout that collapsed on mobiles.

Where is the best place/s to find design research?

I've got three things. The last is the key in a "I know more now" sense but the first two provide the framework to let you go ahead and do it or hold you back.

Confidence. You are only as good as you let yourself be. Believe in yourself more. Don't let your worries block your development.

Forgiveness. Forgive yourself for mistakes and not knowing things. As that DHH viral Twitter thing showed, even the best and most productive developers Google the basics all the time

Challenges. I grew the most as a developer when I had to do something and I needed to get something done. Be it a side project, new job or saying yes to something a little out of your comfort zone, challenges help you forge ahead with purpose.

It's often why books and courses don't get you that further ahead on their own. It takes that need to fix x or implement y to really develop

Developer and marketing/product strategist

Location: Sheffield, UK

Remote: Yes (Preferred)

Willing to relocate: Yes (For right opportunity/team)

Technologies: Ruby, PHP, Rails, WordPress, JavaScript. AWS. Anything I need to use etc. to help get a product/team ahead

CV: https://goo.gl/TWBEzi

Email: grillopress@gmail.com

Of them all the one i used the most was Codio.

It used to have a minimal set of things you could install but moved to a clean Ubuntu box that you can pretty much muck about with and install what you like.

For Rails, it is perfectly suited and very easy to spin up an Ubuntu VM and play.

I used Cloud9 before hand and though this was a while ago, I had a demo of an Express thing with MongoDB and about 15 mins before said demo it started falling apart.

I believe the uptime is pretty great, just a lasting impression of failing just at the wrong time.

Codio seems to have pivoted however to be more about offering educational institutions the ability to create courses etc. so though powerful, that is what the developers are focused on now

Occasionally the version number of things lag behind in Codio and that is my biggest gripe. That and PHP boxes not having mod_rewrite enabled out the box, but that is just me

I work in a large health organisation right now and the thing that seems to blow most away is just saying yes.

I don't work in the IT department and they basically say no to everything. Regardless of business value or difficulty.

I work in the chief executive office and numerous departments will be amazed when I say yes... Let me look into that.

Recent example was a publicly facing, real-time waiting time tracker for the city's A&E (as well as two walk in centres). Each solution I thought of had compromises but they chose the one they could live with.

Lots of good advice here about pushing back. Be sure to do it in your own voice of course and no need for a revolution. It may be best to focus on small things and grow from there

In that vein, the BBC used to vet new hires (in an assessment) around how they would react to a colleague who kept asking for help on similar things but refused to learn how to do it themselves.

No idea if they still do this but worth thinking if you are enabling your colleagues to just dump it on you.

Ask yourself, do you completely take over? Have you tried getting them to do it by talking them through but not hands on solving it for them?

Often quicker a couple of times to just take over but long term they'll be reliant on you and you'll be stuck helping them solve that problem time after time.

Harder to do that with tasks from a manager or similar, but I've found it helps to talk through what you'd have to do, what you'd have to drop and problems you see coming. You'll probably still have to do it but you can make explicit what will move down your pecking order.

Wish you and the team at Brightwork well Josh. Good luck on the launch.

Don't want to be negative but I will say the landing page wasn't as polished as expected. So important in terms of confidence especially as I'd be paying you to own lots of my apps' back end. Case in point is the use of images with text in them rather than an image with text underneath.

As someone who has to build things solo most of the time, AWS does not need a specialist.

Oh yes, to squeeze the most out of it, I am sure it does.

But you can get along with EC2, Route 53 etc. pretty fine.

Personally found the multiple terms, docs (outdated) and other stories of people being billed lots pretty intimidating but when it came down to it, it wasn't as scary as I made it out to be and I've set things up at about half the cost of Digital Ocean and others.

Similar(ish) thing. I think I starred the project and about a year later I got an email out of the blue from them.

I get that I starred the project on github but that's hardly consent for an email.

Medical imaging is a really interesting field.

Place I do a lot of work with are working on new imaging systems to map human organs like the heart.

While back featured by the BBC here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-27536599

I only do web stuff but I love chatting to them about their systems when i can

Noise cancelling headphones is something a lot of people use.

Angle your desk/screen away from other people's eyelines or things that distract you. One place I worked I was right in front of the kitchen area and that was very distracting. I moved towards a window and that was better because the seagulls didn't tend to distract me.

Another thing I love is a standing desk. I can work in my busy kitchen at home and grab enough focus while a million things are buzzing standing up at a laptop. Don't know when, but realized that and now I prefer to have a dual standing/non-standing desk in open offices as well.

Naturally, that can be a bit awkward in an open space so you have to make sure you're not then distracting everyone else.

The demo currently goes to an error page. I am guessing issues with load?

On Chrome, and this may just be a personal thing, but the font is hard to read against the really clear white background. I don't normally mention these things but it seems the thin font really doesn't stand out and it wasn't a pleasurable experience.

Personally I would just tweak the font-weight as at 200 it is too low for me.

Luckily as I changed the font through Chrome Dev Tools, it kept my style changes intact. A behavior I didn't expect to be honest

I think that refers to the Wired article http://www.wired.com/2014/07/cockroachdb/

With the tag being sign of pedigree. "A scalable DB from people who worked at a place with huge scale DBs".

Whether it is very convincing or not is another matter, but I am sure it gets more clicks/attention

Sounds great. Keep up the great work David. Found your book very good, passed it on to a friend who has just started hacking with Meteor.

Personally worked on a few tech books (150+) and everyone wants to do an introduction chapter but how many people buy a book without knowing the history or Wikipedia level info of the tech?

Jump in faster I say.

Site is extremely well done. Is that something advocated by Manning or a personal thing?

In the early days of the PacktLib product Packt refrained from allowing their content being placed on SafariBooks however their product made little and SafariBooks was generating very large revenues for partners so they went all in and that's why they are now a large part of SafariBooks.

You can even buy Packt ebooks from the O'Reilly site now which shows the extent that Packt benefits from selling its content through O'Reilly (and indicates how much it lost out on by not being the other half of SafariBooks)

It was never a happy partnership, more of a relationship out of necessity.

Pearson once had a team called the "O'Reilly Killers" whose aim was to compete in highly lucrative fields and well send a hammer blow to O'Reilly's diminishing revenue per title (dropping since the dotcom bubble). It may have been more of a mindset that an actual ambition to send O'Reilly out of business but that was the team's name (the name was retired when they joined forced according to Tim).

In regard to the birth of SafariBooks, apparently the story goes that the CEO of Packt chatted to Tim O'Reilly about future of books and ebooks and suggested that an online library would be something developers would use in the future. Tim offered to split the cost and risk having thought about the product and how to bring it into life (it represented a significant risk if no one brought the service as development cos was high) but the CEO of Packt didn't like the cost and risk so Tim, forced to find other partners went to his arch-nemesis Pearson.

Pearson having made tons of money out of subscriptions to libraries and institutions instantly saw the value of the proposition and took the risk (at worst, they would be down what they could afford and O'Reilly would be at risk) and that is how apparently the two enemies became uneasy allies.

O'Reilly have not seen their revenue per title average return to pre dotcom burst levels (currently around 80-100K per book on average in revenue) but they have seen great returns on SafariBooks and they get to monetize rival content so this move signals to me that they see it as their future beyond "just" content development.

-- if you are wondering what Packt did, they made their own cheaper version of SafariBooks on their own which only featured their own books called PacktLib.

-- sources: Worked in tech publishing for a few years, had a few chats and was told of some chats as well as http://radar.oreilly.com/2013/09/how-i-failed.html which is a great read from an interesting man

Something worthwhile is matching the types of jobs you want in the future as well as now and creating a list of the experience or skills they want.

After that, look at what you are lacking or need to learn to fill in those gaps. Create a list of projects and just jump in. Make a blog/journal to track your development for your own sake as well as a good resource to point at. Often grads have lots of good solid skills.

Also worthwhile getting a friend to look at your CV. It might not be highlighting the right skills. Similarly, have a base template but ensure you tailor it to each company and job post (I'm sure you do that but is an easy mistake).

A nice tool (UK job posting only but good none the less) is http://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/ which lets you see what is trending and important in IT job posting. Have you got what is the new hotness?

Make sure you create a compelling cover letter for your CV. Place I work they just hired 3 new people, a bad or boring cover letter killed the chances of many amongst the hundreds of applicants.

Job hunting can be hard. I remember finishing my Masters, having a newborn to look after and no other income coming in and pressure on me to get a job. Took longer than I wanted but I got there and I am sure you will too!

Have a look at the Angular website. It is hardly anything beyond the Bootstrap style. I understand what you're saying. A lack of concern about external presentation can be a warning sign but it's not exclusive nor a reliable indicator as other commentator's have mentioned