Talk given at Codebar Festival.

If you wish to see my slides in their full glory, they are available on Slideshare.

Your work inbox is probably not a place that sparks joy. It’s full of people asking you to do things, complaints that something hasn’t been done, and 571 messages marked urgent.

In fact email is usually considered to be a hindrance, with many productivity guides recommending simply ignoring your email for large periods of the day, blocking out that time for focussed work. The consensus is that your work inbox is just a place that generates distractions, and contains never-ending to-do lists that nag away at you throughout the day.

Unfortunately since Elon shut down the Twitter APIs, the below method no longer works. Still, it was fun while it lasted, eh?

Gephi is a piece of software for visualising graph networks. It’s a powerful tool, and to use it fully requires significant domain knowledge that I don’t possess, but fortunately it’s still fascinating to play around with as an amateur!

As a techie, to me the obvious networks to graph are those created by the big Social Networks - YouTube, Facebook, etc. It’s not hugely surprising to find that mostly these graphs mostly aren’t available for querying, but excitingly there is a plugin that allows you to stream in live data from Twitter.

Last week I facilitated a session at XTC, where we discussed the new product development framework from Basecamp, Shape Up, led by Thomas Ankorn.

It was a really interesting discussion with people exploring the ideas openly, guided by questions posed by Thomas to get the conversation started.

I’ve summarised the points that came up in the discussion, reconstructed from memory and the collected post-its of scribbles at the end of the evening.

1. What problems does this solve?

We started by looking at the positives of the framework, trying to identify strengths that would help mitigate problems we have encountered in our own teams.

DISCLAIMER: This was not my idea - I picked it up from Jane Nicholson at an XTC event, who was introduced to it by Jess Gilbert (who in turn, I am told, got it from someone else). This post is just explaining why I believe it can be a useful exercise, not any truly original thinking!

One of the things that is really important to me is that my team and I keep learning at work. As such, fostering a learning environment is kinda key. I think we do that pretty well at Haplo – we have hired nearly exclusively early-career developers to our tech team for several years now, and one of the key points most hires mention as to why they join is that they feel it’s a good place to learn quickly, with the requisite support early on in their career.

I used to stress a lot about the “efficiency” of how I was using up all the minutes in my day. I’d to cram in as much as possible into time. eg. read on a 10 minute train, write code in the half hour before bed, etc.

While I stressed about it a lot, I never found that I did the “10x” things I read about that were supposed to emerge as a result of this extra “efficiency”. For example I have only finished one of the three side projects I started in 2016, despite promising myself that those wouldn’t take long.

In a team having knowledge that lives only in your head is a terrible thing.

• Humans are forgetful
• Humans are creative, especially when problem-solving
• Computers are not creative
• Computers are not forgetful

So we should get the computers to remember things, and allow the humans to do the creative parts.

Writing software is a creative activity. You start with a blank text file and end up convincing people to give you their identity details in exchange for the ability to poke someone over Facebook. If that’s not creative I don’t know what is.

I like being able to code wherever I am. “Unfortunately”, my 15" laptop bought to run simulations for my degree still runs like a dream, so I can’t really justify buying myself a replacement for it. So instead, just over a year ago, I decided to get something that is:

• Lightweight
• Cheap
• Allows me to code on the go

Looking around a bit, a budget Chromebook seemed like a good choice. I settled on an Asus Chromebook C201, which cost me £190. It has 4GB of RAM, a 16GB SSD, and weighs under a kilo.

Agile tells us that the most critical thing for getting software right is not up front design, but getting something out there and used, and then incorporating feedback. By getting feedback early, you are able to respond faster, changing your (initially incorrect) design in small steps towards a better solution. This works better in practice than designing everything at the start very carefully, which feels rigid and inflexible in the face of new information over the course of a project.

It is upsettingly easy to work hard without being productive. The Lean Startup includes a quote I really liked:

“[People] feel that a good day is one in which they did their job well all day.”

The point being that this doesn’t account for whether you are doing the right work. This is a really common trap to fall in to. I know I have often worked really hard on something and produced code I’m very happy with, only to talk to my boss or the client and find that nobody else seems to be nearly as pleased with what I’ve produced as I am.

A theme of the last few books I’ve read has been user testing. Specifically, that it is completely unreasonable to suggest that you could produce a system that will work smoothly in production without first getting several actual human users unfamiliar with your system, from your clients or in a related industry, to road-test the system.

I think anyone can see that this is a good idea. It’s far too easy to make assumptions about the users’ requirements or use cases. Without user testing software would rarely solve the problems it was designed for.

Why do I want to have my own site?

Narcissism mostly. I found the domain was available, decided as a self-respecting developer I should probably buy it. But then there’s no point owning a domain if you don’t put something there. So that was it really - I had to I had to get my act together and actually write the thing.

I enjoy developing

I’m a person who finds it hard to devote time outside of office hours to write code. I suspect it’s because I hate fun. Whatever the reason, if I’m not doing something useful, I won’t bother. So having decided I would like to code more, I had to find something useful to write.