Archive for the ‘Developer’ Category

Building apps? Sweatbox them. We just started doing this, and it works.

Andy Parkhouse - January 23rd, 2013

WTF is sweatboxing?
Film production technique from Disney, also used by Pixar. Animators gather every morning with the film’s director to review previous day’s work (rushes).

  • animation is time-consuming
  • changes are costly and painful
  • many many people are working on a film at once
  • the work needs to fit together so that the vision and story flow

Linky linky

Called Sweatbox because…

  • the room Disney used was hot
  • work people have slaved over is ruthlessly, brutally scrutinised

Why use Sweatbox when building apps?

  • all the same production problems as animation, but with user experience, usability, support and maintenance added for Extra Fun Times
  • quickly find what isn’t working (team-sized variant of hallway testing)
  • find opportunities for plus-ing (Pixar’s technique for adding more to good ideas)
  • you want to build an outstandingly good artefact, right? So critique what you’re building, honestly and relentlessly

Things Sweatbox isn’t:

  • this is not the standup meeting for whatever agile methods you’re using (standup is not a place for critique)
  • not testing with end users against their actual needs
  • not a planning meeting
  • not tea and biscuits meetings
  • not a beasting session for individuals on the team

How are we doing it?

  • big TV – not the real environment an app is used in, but big = easier to see (grouping around a single laptop is terrible, and is even less like using the real app)
  • standing up, creates freedom to move and think, to enter into or withdraw from confrontation, and to move to point at things
  • done on the floor where the rest of the team (account managers, sales consultants etc) work, so they can be drawn in quickly for testing + opinion

Do these or you’re doing Sweatbox wrong:

  • no holds barred – total honesty
  • BUT critique the artefact not the person
  • “did you consider [xyz]?”: good
  • “this is going to cause support issues”: good
  • “you should have done [xyz]“: bad
  • “that flow sucks because [xyz]“: good
  • “you have completely screwed this up”: bad
  • “would [xyz] work better?”: good
  • “you are a dumbass”: bad

Wot no picture?
Nah, it’s just us standing round a TV. Imagine it if you must.

Programming and development that doesn’t suck – 2012 edition

Andy Parkhouse - September 21st, 2012

Ach, I’m not looking for arrogant gits, but if you can write good, pragmatic code, you’ll know it. Right now I need good developers and programmers like I need clean air to breathe.

We have a decent environment (in Bristol) in which to write software. It’s not perfect; it’s a bit busy, but we care and say thanks, and the people are ok and I reckon that counts for a lot. We also have version control and testing and decent chairs and lunch, a lack of fear and no pissy politics.

Not in Bristol? We can work with you remotely. We have irc, and a ticketing system and version control, and we’re used to working with people around the world (we have staff in multiple locations; some of us also contribute to open source projects). We can also overlap time zones (within reason), but you’ll have to provide your own chair and lunch. icon razz Programming and development that doesnt suck   2012 edition

I’m not going to play CV skills acronym bingo (believe that’s a game for recruitment consultants); good developers and programmers get stuff done without needing ‘a year’s experience of this’ or ‘three year’s experience of that’. Typically we work well with people who’ve got a computer science degree and have been coding since at least their early teens. YMMV. We prefer people who can write.

This is a contract or part-time scenario; we’re not looking to hire full-time-permanent for this work right now (but stuff changes).

We need to get some web app and operations stuff done, here’s the outline:
- we generally use extensible hypertext markup language and cascading stylesheets There may be other ways to do it, but we’ve found these ones are pretty good and not too much hassle. We’re also using some javascript, which seems to suck less these days.

- we generally use python. Generally python doesn’t suck. That’s something. We use it to try and make apps that don’t suck, for business reasons that don’t suck. We use other stuff too.

- there are some database things to do. Sometimes in various flavours of SQL.

- we have lots of devops things, including deployment automation, for servers around the world; sysadmin and shell scripting ftw.

- we’ll like you more if you can combine programming and UI/UX; we try to avoid silos, I prefer working with people who can solve an interesting computational problem and put together a good GUI to hide the computation from the humans. Being a photoshop guru is not essential though.

There’s a bunch of things to get done right now. They’re usually interesting. There’ll probably be some more things to do after that. Stick around until you’re bored of us. Sound interesting? Mail Lorna lorna.moir@teamrubber.com.

cheers,

Andy

(This is a reprise of something I wrote in 2008 which worked then. So I’m shamelessly repurposing it. Not all contexts demand originality).

Hiring: Software Testing / Test Automation

Andy Parkhouse - May 21st, 2012

We’re rebuilding a big web app and I need someone to take care of testing and engineering test automation.

We have a decent environment (in Bristol) where we write software. It’s not perfect; it’s a bit busy, but we care and say thanks, and the people are ok and I reckon that counts for a lot. We also have version control and testing and decent chairs and lunch, a lack of fear and no pissy politics.

This job will work better if you’re in Bristol, face to face communication is valuable for this role, but we can also work with you remotely. We have irc, and a ticketing system and version control, and we’re used to working with people around the world (we have staff in multiple locations; some of us also contribute to open source projects). We can also overlap time zones (within reason), but you’ll have to provide your own chair and lunch. icon razz Hiring: Software Testing / Test Automation

You’ll be testing software already, and familiar with tools similar to Selenium and Hudson, as well as being technically capable of talking to our programmers, and solving engineering problems. We’ll be doing interesting things with automation for deployments and system management, and you’ll need to be involved with this. It’s a fun challenge because mistakes cost us real money icon smile Hiring: Software Testing / Test Automation

It’s probably a full-time permanent position, but we’ll consider flexible ways of getting stuff done.

Interested? Drop me a line: andy@teamrubber.com

WooCons #1 Extras

Andy Parkhouse - May 20th, 2012

I really like the WooCons #1 icon set from WooThemes (drawn by Janik Baumgartner). It’s a great set, with a clean style, and is licensed under GPL(v2). Janik and WooThemes seem like nice people too icon smile WooCons #1 Extras

For one of our apps, I needed a couple of extra icons (‘Add Contact’ and ‘Boxes’).

‘Add Contact’ was pretty easy, I take no credit for that. ‘Boxes’ was a hack on Janik’s work, and I’m not totally satisfied with it, but I ran out of time to spend on it.

woocons1 tr extras WooCons #1 Extras

These extras are downloadable here as a zip, licensed under GPL(v2).
woocons1-TR-extras.zip

Google Image Search searches by image!

Tom Blockley - June 29th, 2011

So I went on to Google just now to look for an image, and I discovered that they now let you drag and drop images into the image search bar!

Now this is impressive. It’s like TinEye + DropBox + Googles own similar images functionality.

So I played around for a bit, and it turns out it’s even smarter than that! I dragged an image of me playing a gig into the search box, and it identified my bass!

Picture 11 Google Image Search searches by image!
It recognised that:

  1. I was playing an instrument
  2. It is a bass
  3. It is a Musicman Stingray

Google scares me sometimes.

WordPress 3.1 is released

- February 24th, 2011

WordPress 3.1 has been released and is named Reinhardt after legendary jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt. Some of the notable new features include:

  1. New Site Admin bar – a new admin bar has been added to the logged in live view, enabling quick editing of posts / pages
  2. Post formats – now able to tag post format and subsequently display individual post formats eg. gallery post, aside, features
  3. Multi-taxonimy queries – essentially an improved searching mechanism, more power to developers icon smile Wordpress 3.1 is released
  4. Network Admin User – superseeds multi-site WordPress “Super Admin” user
  5. In-site post linking – adds the facility to search and add links for internal blog posts / pages – big UI win!

This update certainly moves WordPress on from a simple blogging engine to a fully fledged CMS. Go download the latest update NOW! In honour of the release here’s Django at his best:

0 Wordpress 3.1 is released

Who’s actually using RDFa?

Jess Norwood - February 21st, 2011

A year ago we were very excited about RDFa, and in particular about using it to mark up consultations in our how to get your girlfriend back

space.com”>Citizen Space software. By providing certain bits of metadata in a machine-readable format (for example the consultation’s title, start and end dates, target audience, author etc) the consultation record can be used by third-party systems, and potentially incorporated into applications that hadn’t even been envisaged when the data was originally published.

RDFa actually became a mandatory requirement for all central government consultations published after 1st January 2010, but in the past year we have seen very little use of this new wealth of freely available data. There were rumours that Directgov planned to use it to import consultations, but I can’t find any evidence of this on their site.

We were sad that we’d gone to all the trouble* to incorporate RDFa into our clients’ consultations, and nobody was making use of it, so we decided to do something with it ourselves. We’ve made an Aggregator that can collect together consultations from any website as long as it publishes its consultations in an RSS feed and includes the appropriate RDFa markup. It also publishes its own RSS feed so that the aggregated consultations can be fed into a further tier of applications.

We’d be really interested to hear of other apps that are making use of RSS and RDFa in relation to consultation data. Surely we’re not the only ones?

*actually it wasn’t much trouble at all thanks to the helpful guidelines from the COI.