Notes from the coalface
Thoughts from a life helping deliver great projects
TGIF: Think of a Good Idea for the Friday retro
TGIF Or in my world: that moment of panic when you have to quickly Think of a Good Idea for the Friday retro. I have a love/hate relationship with looking back.It’s a constant thing in IT: you hold a retrospective every sprint.But so many teams use it as a moaning shop, whinging but doing nowt about
The dark side of Amazon search
I hate Amazon search.It just doesn’t work. You search for a specific thing.And it brings you back related, but unhelpful, other stuff.You can’t even exclude things from the search, like you can on proper search tools. If I need a screen cover for a certain phone, I don’t want to see covers for other phones.If I search
Undocumented tomato feature
PSA: reading this post may make you immediately go and check your tomatoes for a little-known feature I’m about to reveal… In hindsight, I was always destined to be a problem-solver.An untangler of knotty problems.A niggler at complex issues. Even when that problem is as commonplace as a tomato. Many moons ago when I was waiting for my
British manners and ChatGPT
The British queue. We say sorry to inanimate objects we bump into.We say our pleases and thank yous.Even to ChatGPT (other AI tools are available). I do feel a bit funny about brusquely calling it ChatGPT though:”ChatGPT, please do X”It seems so rude. I’ve seen someone call AI tools ArtieDavid Hieatt calls it Chatty.Bing & Aria work. And there’s
The super-skinny
I have a confession. It’s a hard thing to admit in public. Almost heresy. But it’s true. [Deep breath] I’ve fallen out of love with the MVP. In principle, the Minimum Viable Product is great. But there are (at least) two things wrong with the concept.1) Almost nobody in the history of MVPs truly keeps it ‘minimum’. There’s always bloat
Aubergine
My Mum loathes aubergine. And spinach. They’re too new-fangled for her. This from a woman who’s eaten all sorts of things in her extensive travels across the world – she once brought me home the skull fished out from a monkey stew. I’m not quite sure what she thought 9-year-old me would want with such a thing…
Men in lycra on bikes
Men in lycra on bikes. Laminated flexible plastics. Two things that should strike fear into the heart of any right-minded, reasonably green person. But for once, they’re a perfect combo. A company I work with, Enval Ltd., has signed up to collect all the energy gel pouches and wrappers from the upcoming Tour of Britain. They’ll then recycle them. Not
Give yourself a gift: do less today
Be honest, when do you do your best work?When you’re trying to do a million things at once? Or when you’re able to focus your attention on one thing in particular? And by ‘best’ I mean most creative. Most insightful. Most valuable. Yesterday, I was working with a new team, setting up their first project.They’d done some things
Planned uncertainty
I love an oxymoron. My current favourite is ‘planned uncertainty’. Yeah, I know. How can you possibly plan when things are unknown, uncertain? But you can. You can plan your best guess and hold that plan lightly.Knowing something will change, even when you don’t know what. You can have backup plans: a Plan B for when Plan
Everything is tech
Are you sitting reading this, coffee in one hand, phone in the other, thinking “I don’t do tech”? And yet you’ve got a fantastic piece of tech right there in your mitts. No, I don’t mean the phone. I’m talking about the coffee. A huge amount of tech has gone into growing the coffee beans, roasting them, shipping
It’s all been a gorgeous mistake
I’m still musing on the late, great Sinead O’Connor’s back catalogue. So many fantastic lyrics. But one stood out for me: It’s all been a gorgeous mistake. I love the spirit behind that. That we get our biggest breakthroughs when we leave space for chance. For serendipity. Or, more prosaically, not being so tied to
When did you last accidentally wear something inside out or back-to-front?
Last week, just as my day was finishing, I realised I’d had my top on inside out all day.I’d had several video calls. Even a lunch date with my Ma. Nobody had said a thing. I only noticed because the label brushed against my arm. But did it actually matter? No. It did the basic things it