January 2012
14 posts
“Micro-manage much? Communicating information from life form to another is a...”
– Terrible Teacher and Mentor, Top 10 Reasons Yoda Was - GeekWire
Top 10 reasons why Darth Vader was an amazing... →
This Article Explains Why Apple Makes iPhones In... →
“When former Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones recently formed a new rock...”
– From ABBA to ZZ Top, All the Good Bands Names Are Taken - WSJ.com
Essentially, all UI design is about manipulating users, whether you’re coming up with the most easily understood button labels that will get people to click on the correct button, the most readable typeface that will get people to read your essay, or design ideas taken from videogames. The goal of UI design is to get people to use our products successfully. That’s «manipulating people».
“Reads: Old: The Wall Street Journal
New: TechCrunch and GigaOM”
– Product Management Then and Now
Cóż… ja też terefere.
The fact that vendors of cloud services and SaaS tools are seducing business managers into violating corporate policies by signing their own IT contracts is a governance issue that Boards need to stamp on before somebody takes their company down. And in the meantime IT needs to do some serious discovery and policing. These maverick business units are like children who have run away from...
Cauvin: Top 5 Prospect Interview Mistakes →
“I remember going through this realization myself. There was a point in 1995 when...”
– Schlep Blindness
“Since we did continuous releases, our software didn’t actually have...”
– Snapshot: Viaweb, June 1998
“Nie oznacza to absolutnie, że przestałem wierzyć, iż zwinne praktyki i sama idea...”
– Battle for Agility » Coś się kończy, coś się zaczyna…
December 2011
23 posts
“Good ideas are not adopted automatically. They must be driven into practice with...”
– Binder-chuckers | The IT Skeptic
“I do like Apple’s take on the situation with new hires - hand off a...”
– How does your company/department deliver IT training | LinkedIn
We spend most of our days living with ourselves, our partners, our children, and our organizations. And maybe a dog. Or a chinchilla. A happy life should include feeling happy about the relationships that you maintain, with yourself, your spouse, your kids… and your colleagues. (And your chinchilla.)
I call it the T-Shirt Test. An organization passes the t-shirt test when employees will proudly...
When the Blogger team asked for design templates, it was really difficult to create anything appropriate devoid of content. Doug Bowman made a universal template that was minimalist and ended up on 20 million blogs. It was the best solution for the problem of designing where you don’t know the content. But it’s one of the only success solutions to this problem out there, which illustrates how...
Be Disloyal card
Coffee shops around the world have employed loyalty card schemes for many years, but now we’ve come across an interesting twist on the idea. In Singapore, a collaborate scheme aims to benefit eight of the city’s best independent cafés with the Be Disloyal disloyalty card.
The Be Disloyal disloyalty card — created by digital creative agency Antics, blogger Cortadito.sg and eight of Singapore’s...
(…) jedna z firm doradzający przy budowie galerii handlowych wydała ostatnio rekomendację, by w nowo budowanym centrum na ścianie wschodniej jako główny sklep spożywczy umieścić… dyskont typu Biedronka albo Lidl. Jeszcze niedawno taki ruch był nie do pomyślenia. Biedronka umacniająca się na pozycji lidera detalicznego handlu spożywczego jest bliska opanowania 10 proc. rynku. Po...
“YouTube mobile gets over 400M views a day (up 3x year/year), representing 13% of...”
– YouTube - Broadcast Yourself
I’ve already begun to see the more forward-thinking companies maturing in their thinking about how they use “named” business, technology, and management concepts, e.g., Scrum, Lean, Kanban, CMMI, ISO 9000, ITIL, COBIT, Devops, etc. There’s growing skepticism in the efficacy of popularized approaches. Executives are less likely to rush into using new ideas just because they’ve heard “the name”....
Nadal duża część klientów oczekuje kontaktu z doradcą w normalnych salonach. Do tego wprowadziliśmy do naszych wypożyczalni asortyment spożywczy i prawie 30 sekcji z winem, co cieszy się bardzo dużą popularnością wśród naszych klientów - mówi Marcin Wolszczak, dyrektor generalny w Beverly Hills Video. Ta jedna z największych ogólnopolskich sieci wypożyczalni filmów ma obecnie 39 salonów, choć...
“Crap Factoids are pure bull-excrement that almost sound like a fact, and will be...”
– Crap Factoid | The IT Skeptic
Similarly, Longreads.com gets about 100,000 unique visitors a month, founder Mark Armstrong told me. For this last week, publishers altogether got 21,230 referrals form Longreads’ curated picks. Despite this modest volume, Longreads’ 40,000+ community of referrers is growing rapidly at the rate of a thousand every two weeks or so.
Let’s talk business model. The Longreads team includes former...
“In early 2012, 37signals will introduce Basecamp Next and change the way people...”
– Basecamp Next: Get an invite.
Hipernet24 - kuriozalny e-mail
From: Hipernet24 <robot@hipernet24.pl> Subject: Świąteczne zakupy w hipernet24.pl Date: 8 grudnia 2011 12:02:30 CET To: Tomasz Skórski <XXXXXXXX@home.pl>
Jak każdego roku zwracamy się do naszych stałych Klientów z prośbą, aby zamówienia, jakie planujecie Państwo realizować w okresie przedświątecznym składać już teraz z jak największym wyprzedzeniem.
Z praktyki...
“Guide to the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (SWEBOK)”
– SWEBOK Guide - HTML Format
Klingon rules for systems development
10. Specifications are for the weak and timid! 9. You question the worthiness of my code? I should kill you where you stand! 8. Indentation?! - I will show you how to indent when I indent your skull! 7. What is this talk of ‘release’? Klingons do not make software ‘releases’ Our software ‘escapes’ leaving a bloody trail of designers and quality assurance...
November 2011
32 posts
My style is to ask politely and then when I realize nothing is going to be done, to do it myself. This is a prized hacker ethic, but it does NOT work in large teams. There is simply too much system complexity for this to scale as a solution. Instead of shaving one Yak, you’re shaving the entire Yak pen at the Zoo, and pretty soon traveling to Tibet to shave foreign Yaks you’ve never...
My colleague and I joined on the same day and were employees #25 & #26 of Walkabout. As we walked out of the meeting room I asked if we would be the last, thinking this was a sizeable number for any startup let alone an early-stage one. I was met with a somewhat incredulous “No, no. Not at all!” That was a red flag I ignored wilfully.
“PayPal saw a six-fold (516%) increase in global mobile payment volume on Black...”
– Mobile Shopping More Popular Than Ever Before on Black Friday
More and more large companies are going to perform the great experiment: base all their IT on Agile and/or DevOps principles. I’m betting it will end in tears: more projects will get delivered more quickly … but sooner or later availability, continuity and data integrity will go down the toilet.
As I said above, there is an awful lot of learning and failing has to go on before either...
“Process seems to be a dirty word in DevOps. You can get away with that in teams...”
– DevOps and traditional ITSM - why DevOps won’t change the world any time soon.
A Visual History of Manhattan's Grid - Design →
“The budget process does not support incremental releases.”
– Why aren’t people interested in releasing incrementally?
“It’s ok to have your own app, but your entire mobile marketing strategy...”
– Building a Mobile App Is Not a Mobile Strategy - Jason Gurwin - Harvard Business Review
Tesco developed an email campaign with a highly ‘personalised‘ shopping list that was customised for each customer, using the customer‘s previous in-store or online grocery purchased data. The shopping list featured actual grocery items that the customer had purchased across different departments, and these were the same items they would find in ‘Favourites’ on Tesco.com. Each...
Argos will be trialling new delivery options from today, offering same day delivery to customers in the London area, something which could give the retailer a real advantage over its competitors.
The new delivery options will be provided by startup Shutl, which aggregates same day delivery capacity across a range of couriers, and can deliver stock from stores to customers within 90...
