Part of the Process

Last night I attended the first WordUp Brighton event of 2018 . Tammie Lister talked about the new WordPress editor, Gutenberg, and Dave Potter gave a talk on security. This was outside of my usual bubble as I'm making more of an effort in 2018 to explore the local "tech scene" outside of day-to-day concerns. Dave started off with a great look at "security". This wasn't the talk I was expecting from the title but brilliant. I had initially thought it would be about things like hacking, but it was more to do with the security of business processes. So important things like back-up and retention strategies, which introduced the hot topic of GDPR! How hosting impacts those. Also other things to look out for in hosting that can impact your business continuity, like what do hosts do when they see network spikes ... will they just take down your instance or a whole server? Tammie then did an intro to a new WordPress editor from Project Gutenburg. This look

This week has been about kicking off projects at work and a major release for my side project. Because of this my reading has probably gravitated towards thoughts of design, focus and leadership around both.  Voice-Enabled Design is different enough to "point and click" that I think it will lead to some change of the profile of Product People. Interesting theory here that Drama Teachers will be the ideal people to lead the charge here.  Drama teachers may be one specialism IT could do more of. Critical thinkers is another. For example  “I think it will make for a perfect alarm clock”  Trusted Reviews - Amazon Echo Spot Here it looks like part of the problem with technology is the largely uncritical approach of what could go wrong, in building and selling, no mention of privacy concerns apart from throw away comment about a "mute" feature. Maybe they fell foul of the issue in this great quote from  Davide Vitiello in his  Focus vs Product Team Structures 

Last night I had a fun time in that there London town, for a meetup organised by Cennydd Bowles. I had become aware of the event after reading his post  A techie’s rough guide to GDPR . This was also a fairly rare trip to the Silicon Roundabout for me, and I was struck by how much it has changed recently. It was a low key, informal event with no agenda. Just interested (and interesting!) people talking about ethics and technology. Among the people I talked to were Anne who is organising an Ethical track at QCon, Rachel who had a brilliant ice break around topics that we thought would help keep technology ethical. Mark's answer that the fast scaling was an issue was more convincing than mine that "transparency" would be the answer. To paraphrase, he said that companies like Uber, AirBnB, and Facebook had probably scaled much quicker than their corporate governance and leadership could scale. The ecosystems that develop around these companies also further diluted the eth

Photo by  Jo Szczepanska  on  Unsplash Getting the correct tools in place for any initiative is important. For any product concentrating the core functionality is also key. Anything that isn't a core function should come off the shelf. Very few circumstances are that specialised to need to roll your own.  The number one example of this for me are passwords. Not only do you not want to spend the time writing authentication code. You also won't want to spend the time doing so securely. Most people already have a Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, GitHub, or whatever log-in. Just use that.  I have already shared about infrastructure that we chose for Bashfully. Had the project been different we may have made different choices. For example, Python and R have brilliant support for statistics and machine learning. Java is great support for build, CI and distributed system tooling. In this post I am going to take a look at a couple of feedback tools, as this is important where

As part of my continuing professional development I have taken two courses. They are similar in terms of backer and effort required. Hopefuly they will help me to prepare for 2018! The first is an intro to Ethics and Law related to analytics and AI applications. This provided by Microsoft on the edX platform. This followed a common format of: a short video,  linked content to read,  labs to explore the subject, and finally  quizzes to check progress.  The content was still fresh with the course first run in April 2017. This meant it was topical with GDPR law as well as FCC rulings in the USA. If you are in IT and interested in Ethics, then I can recommend learning from an ethicist. There is no real need to come up with your own moral framework, since there is over 2000 years of open research. Having the two experts from different domains present their viewpoints and way of working was a nice escape from the technologist bubble. The second was actually a pair of courses:

Photo by  Matthew Spiteri  on  Unsplash Inspired by this tweet I have decided to do a follow up to what I have learned in 2017 , with what I have "unlearned" Try it the other way around…. What have you unlearned / let go of this year? https://t.co/uzbsumUzh7 — Dan Creswell (@dancres) December 30, 2017 I really like this idea, as looking back I suspect most of the time I’ve truly learned something I’ve been able to let go. In 2018 I am going to be much more mindful about whether fear or learning drives adding new ideas/skills/practices this year. I feel that it is much easier to layer on new skills while you learn them, without thinking about what in your tool kit is no longer useful ... or at least if the effort outweighs  the benefit/impact  of not doing it. The main thing I have let go of this year has been no longer worrying about agile/scrum ceremonies and artifacts. Along with the main team I work with, I have moved to a much more flow driven way o

When pondering what to write about looking forward to 2018 I had a shortlist of three hot topics: AR Blockchain Artificial Intelligence (AI) I didn't choose AR as I think it will remain a specialist tool, although cool apps like  Star Chart  that my family love exist and Pokemon Go showed how addictive usage in games can be, it's still early days for tool kits like ARKit  to make a break through app. Blockchain is still probably at least a year off. Given the co-ordination needed in business process innovation it takes a bit longer to get into the mainstream. It appears that the processing speed is also a bit of a impediment at the moment. I am watching this field with interest though as it has potential to change the way companies process transactions. (Edit:  although this is now the subject of a 15below tech take ) Which leaves AI. I chose this not just because it's been my key interest my whole adult life, but also because it is making another big step