This page is a collection of my blog posts that originated from thoughts while working across different roles in tech companies …
Making technical demos more engaging
You’ve completed the sprint – the goal was hit and you’re ready to demo your new changes! But it’s only you and the product owner who have turned up to the session – the other stakeholders “couldn’t make it”. You…
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Ending a TV show and ways of working
I had a discussion with my partner recently about how so few TV shows had decent endings, even if they had a huge amount of money thrown into them like Game of Thrones. After a bit of reading I stumbled…
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Heat maps are awesome
I love heat maps – they’re a great way to show certain types of data in a really visual way. While typically thought of as being used to show the density of something, we can be quite creative with what…
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Supercharging your surveys
It can be difficult to get people to answer surveys, so when they do take the time, you want to make sure that what you get back is going to be useful. In this post I’ll share a few things…
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When RAG statuses go bad
We can tell when the use of a RAG status is going to be ineffective – when the statuses haven’t been defined. If we don’t give definitions to what red, amber, and green mean then things can start to unravel…
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Keeping cool in a heatwave
It feels like we got our first proper taste of the impacts of global warming in the UK this week with the new highs of 40+ degrees. I’m fortunate enough to be able to work remotely so I avoided travelling…
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Four reasons why your process introduction may have failed
You’ve come up with the perfect process, written a summary document which explains what people must do at each stage and got the go-ahead from your boss! Fast forward to three months later and your colleagues haven’t read your document, some are still working through back doors to get things done and an annoying few are ignoring the new process completely. Here are four reasons why it might not have gone to plan…
Keep readingMapping the present and vector based measures
I’m spending the Easter weekend in Berlin but in order to get here I had to go on a journey first. This Involved both trains and planes with various checkpoints in between. There was always a destination in my mind…
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Attractors in the dating industry
We could approach dating as the problem of whittling down seven billion people to one we want to partner with. The rise of technology has produced new ways of finding this person – from swiping and ‘liking’ to artificial intelligence…
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Mapping Culture with Archetypes
I feel as though culture is seen as the holy grail for creating a successful agile environment and I agree that having a vision of where you want your company’s culture to be is important. However, setting off in a…
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Chaos and Innovation
The word ‘chaos’ is used in the Cynefin framework to describe a domain where the agents of a system have no constraints. While the chaotic domain can be a bad place to be, in the right circumstances it can be…
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White paper on the secret sharing implementation in Hashicorp’s Vault
Securing a secret, whether it’s a password, sensitive information or a cryptographic key, is hard to get right. Hashicorp’s Vault attempts to remove the headaches by providing simple APIs no matter what form the storage back-end takes. I have just finished a report which…
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Systems Thinking, Complexity Thinking and Anthro-Complexity
I had another trip to Amsterdam this month to attend Dave Snowden‘s course: Cynefin and Sense-Making. I’ll be making a series of posts about what I learnt. I’ll start by comparing systems thinking and complexity thinking and by giving an introduction…
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Stop trying to solve hard problems!
Earlier this week I had a discussion about the running time of an algorithm used to test a method. This got me thinking about one of my favourite areas of computer science – computational complexity. We can use complexity theory to…
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Velocity 2015, 2: System Design = Organisation Design
This is the second of a series of posts covering what I learnt at Velocity Amsterdam 2015. During the second day, Mike Amundsen of CA Technologies shared his insights into the works of Melvin Conway. While Conway’s Law may be well known, it…
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Velocity 2015, 1: Keeping Secrets Secret
I was fortunate enough to attend Velocity in Amsterdam this year, which followed several major themes – one of which being security. This post was inspired by a presentation given by Alex Schoof entitled “Managing Secrets at Scale”.
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A perfect matching of complex roots
As part of a placement earlier this year, I was given two sets of functions to play with. The first set was implemented in both MATLAB and FORTRAN and formed a root-finding algorithm. The second was implemented in only MATLAB…
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Processing big data from small experiments
I thought I’d share a post about a problem we faced in the most recent project I worked on. The aim of the project was to calculate certain properties of fluids which were being forced through a jet. This involved…
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