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How Lean Saves You Money

2013 December 11
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by Josette Garcia

Dave Fletcher, founder and MD of web and apps developer White October believes that by using tried and tested Lean methods in product development, you can make your idea work better while spending less of your budget. Here he explains how it works for his customers.

White October

You Have a Great Idea

If you’re like most of our customers then you’ll have a great idea that you really believe in.  Your idea could be about how to solve a problem in your business or sector.  Or it could be about how to take advantage of an opportunity you’ve noticed.  Either way your idea will be a good one and you’ll need help to make it happen.

However, at some point in the past you’ve probably had a bad experience of developing good ideas into products.  Maybe your product didn’t develop as smoothly as intended. It may have missed big deadlines, gone over budget or delivered ineffective results.  You’re scared of this happening again and how much your idea might cost.  Your budget is finite and your company may even see software development as expensive and risky.

Whatever your past experiences, taking a Lean approach helps you drastically cut the risks and deliver a better product, for less money.

Why Lean is the Solution

“Lean: a method for developing products that shortens their development cycles by adopting a combination of business-hypothesis-driven experimentation, iterative product releases, and ‘validated learning.” – Wikipedia

Lean is a blend of techniques originally developed to bring pioneering high-tech products effectively to market.  These techniques are now being adopted across the globe by individuals, teams and companies looking to introduce new products or services into the market.  Because of their proven success we use these techniques across all our projects.

By deploying Lean techniques, we treat your idea with care and belief, while rigorously testing out its viability by identifying, challenging and then validating your assumptions before making significant decisions.  This approach minimises risks and conserves your budget, ensuring every penny is spent as efficiently as possible.

The result?  You get more time and money to spend on the best possible version of your idea.

Testing Assumptions Avoids Waste

We all make assumptions.  Its part of life, especially when we’re at the early stages of an idea.  At this stage we usually make assumptions about who will use the eventual product and how.

At White October we help you test these assumptions.  We help you make good decisions based on what you know while testing or postponing what you don’t.  This drastically reduces the chances of making an incorrect assumption, setting off in the wrong direction and wasting money on ideas or features that aren’t going to work.

If this story sounds familiar it’s because everyone has done it, even (and especially) the most successful companies.

Lean Conserves Your Budget for the Most Valuable Features

“Lean methodology favours simple experimentation over elaborate planning, customer feedback over intuition, and iterative design over traditional “big design up front” development.” – Harvard Business Review, May 2013

Our approach to Lean identifies assumptions in your thinking, creates simple experiments to test them, identifies the risks and points you in the direction of solutions.  In short it gets the proof you need of the most cost effective direction to take your idea.

Once you’ve made your decision we develop the simplest but most value-filled working version of your product possible.  As we do this we keep testing everyone’s assumptions, building in small iterations, measuring their effectiveness and learning from the results.  We then help you release your product and get fast, quantitative feedback from its users.

By this point you will have:

  • A working version of your product that already delivers real value to its users.

  • Specific, informed feedback on the most valuable aspects of your product.

  • A significant wedge of your budget left to spend on developing your product’s most valuable features even further.

So if you have an idea which you believe in but are concerned it will cost too much to bring to market, give me a call as chances are it won’t be as costly as you think.

 

Dave Fletcher 3Dave Fletcher is founder and MD of White October.   Over the past 10 years he has grown the agency to 25 full time staff.

Dave completed a Mathematics degree from Nottingham University before training on the job as an analyst programmer with RM Plc in Oxfordshire.  With a passion for the web and its potential, Dave has kept at the forefront of technology.  He and White October have gravitated towards projects that pose a technical challenge – his creative drive, technical grounding, and commercial awareness make him ideally placed to advise clients on product development strategy.

LinkedIn: uk.linkedin.com/in/davewhiteoctober/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/whiteoctober

Skype: dafletcher

Phone +44 (0) 1865 920707

from → Methodology

Big data, climate change and developing economies: predictive modeling for improved lives

2013 November 27
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by Dai Clegg

I did my first, and possibly last, Ignite talk at Strata London this week. If you don’t know the format it goes like this: 5 minutes, 20 slides; the slides automatically advance every 15 seconds and you have to tell your story and finish on time.

The story I was telling wasn’t about Acunu, nor even about low latency / real time analytics, which is a topic I’m often to be heard rabbiting on about. Low latency operational intelligence is what Acunu is all about. We build a platform for people who need to know what’s going on in their business right now. Pretty much every industry can benefit from tracking some KPIs minute-by-minute. And you can’t do that on day-old data in a data warehouse or Hadoop cluster, no matter how fast your BI tool can run queries.

Evidence for Development logo

But this time I was talking about a project dreamed up by some friends at Evidence for Development (EfD), a small charity I work with. Their idea is to build an economic model of the whole of rural southern Africa, including data about how people get access to food, market prices and meteorological data, then to build it up over a number of years until you have a database capable of predictive modeling of the effects of climate change in the region. The people at EfD have a ton of experience in building models of rural economies, which are widely, but not consistently, used in the region to help direct better aid projects and provide governments with early warning of disruptions (e.g. impact of crop failure).

There’s lots of support for the idea, but it’s going to be an interesting project to try to pull together all the strands. We’ve already made a start with getting the methodology onto the post-grad curriculum in economics departments in universities in the region, and starting to assemble open source developers to implement and support the software.

To see my talk you might have to refresh the page.

 

 

It was a challenge taking on the Ignite, lightning-talk format, but it was for a good cause and pretty enjoyable over all – apart for stumbling a few times as I raced to get through the story and keep in sync with the slides. I’d thoroughly recommend it to anyone who fancies themselves as a competent public speaker. I learned a bit that I hope will make me better in all formats and I am in awe of my fellow presenters.

dai cleggDai is a multi-decade veteran of the software industry, at some of the giants (Oracle & IBM) and some of the not-so-giant (Netezza and Acunu). He has worked in the trenches as an implementor, in the ivory tower as a text-book author and in a suit as a marketer. He loves learning about new technologies and how they can be usefully exploited – especially in ways that might make the world a better place.

from → Africa, Events, Ignite

Another episode of PHP in Sweetlake

2013 November 19
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by Ramon de la Fuente

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Last Friday was another episode of PHP in Sweetlake. We had a perfectly good plan, and a perfectly good schedule. So obviously that is *not* how things went down…

Due to excessive traffic between Rotterdam and Den Haag, our speaker Harry Verveer ran late. So as a time-filler, we watched a video on privacy by Georg Greve (board member of the Free Software Foundation Europe and CEO at Kolab Systems AG). The video was prepared as a keynote for the government “AlertOnline” campaign that Hans de Raad and Wouter Parent have been involved in. I felt there was *a lot* of food for thought in the video. You can read what I picked up from Georg’s talk at the bottom of this write-up.

Harry Verveer gave his talk on the lost art of UML. While he himself marked most of the types of UML diagrams as obsolete (painful reminders of being forced to draw diagrams in school), there are three types of diagrams still used in his workflow:

  • The Entity Relationship Diagram or ERD: used to draw entity (database) relationships. This is still a very good way to come to grips with what objects and properties you are going to need, without diving into actual code.
  • The Class Diagram: get a feel for what behaviour your classes will need to have.
  • Sequence Diagrams:  explain concepts to non-programmers (like customers). All I can say about this is I want his customers! Most of my customers consider Sequence Diagrams to be abstract art…

Two basic benefits of using UML kept returning in the talk: drawing diagrams forces you into a birds-eye view. And: it’s cheap to refactor on paper. These are two pretty compelling reasons so I’d say if you don’t know these diagrams, learn a bit more about them. They might yet serve a purpose.

We finished with a joint discussion where I got pelted with stress balls in a live demonstration of a Distributed Denial of Service attack, we got a bonus security session where we were educated on how easy it is to compromise wifi and mobile phones (no mobile phones where hurt during the exercise, but TURN OFF WIFI WHEN YOU DON’T USE IT!), and finally a demonstration of Kali Linux.

Magic happened, nobody wanted to leave and we had to be kicked out by Hans at eleven…

Thanks to all the enthusiasm, a security workshop is being planned by WeSecureIT.nl for a future date! Stay tuned.

The Sweetlake PHP website is now on github. It is open source and will be online for about three weeks on the EngineYard platform. I tried to coax a free hosting account from EngineYard, but unfortunately they don’t have a programme for this, so the website remains a work in progress.

As mentioned previously, watch Georg’s keynote and my thoughts on it.

Keynote on Privacy by Georg Greve (you might have to refresh the page)

 

 

We’ve all heard about the NSA’s Prism program by now, and we’ve learned from the leaks by Edward Snowden what the Intelligence Agencies are up to regarding collection of data. What is surprising, Georg says, is that we’re surprised. Because it’s hardly news… the question is, are we going to do anything about it?

Google, Facebook, LinkedIn give you “free” products and then base their business model around selling data about your behaviour. (If you’re not paying for a service – you’re the product). A good example where you can experience this for yourself is Google’s customer support. Users say it’s slow, inaccessible, and in short, awful. But the truth is: Google’s customer support is very good! But you, the product, are just not entitled to it…

And ask yourself: can you truly allow your email to be parsed for “advertising purposes” when you’re receiving confidential information? Do you want Google to know about unhappy employees even before you do and so target them with ads of other opportunities?

Hans de Raad will be taking this further in our next session on December 6th. Don’t miss it!

 

Ramon de la Fuente; Father of two kids, one company and a user group called SweetlakePHP…

from → Events, PHP

Google Code-in 2013 and Google Summer of Code 2014 are on

2013 November 15
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by Josette Garcia

An invitation from Google!

 

gci-logo-300x200

A global online open source development & outreach contest
for precollege students ages 13-17

The Google Code-in contest gives students around the world an opportunity to explore the world of open source development. Google not only runs open source software throughout our business, we value the way the open source model encourages people to work together on shared goals over the Internet.

Give it a try from November 18th, 2013 to January 6th, 2014!

Participants complete “tasks” of their choice for a variety of open source software projects. Students can earn t-shirts and certificates for their work and 20 dedicated students (2 chosen by each software project) will win a trip to Google in Mountain View, CA, USA.

Since open source development is much more than just computer programming, there are lots of different kinds of tasks to choose from, broken out into 5 major categories:

1. Code: Writing or refactoring code
2. Documentation/Training: Creating and editing documentation and helping others learn
3. Outreach/Research: Community management and outreach/marketing, or studying problems and recommending solutions
4. Quality Assurance: Testing to ensure code is of high quality
5. User interface: User experience research or user interface design

The 10 open source organizations that students will be working with this year are: Apertium, BRLCAD, Copyleft Games Group, Drupal, Haiku, KDE, RTEMS, Sahana Software Foundation, Sugar Labs, and Wikimedia Foundation.

Over the past 3 years, 1238 students from 71 countries completed at least one task in the contest. This year we hope to have even more students participate globally. Please help us spread the word and bring more students into the open source family!

Visit googlemelange.com to read our Frequently Asked Questions for all the details on how to participate, to follow our blog, and to join the contest discussion list at http://groups.google.com/group/gcidiscuss for updates on the contest.

The Google Code-in contest starts on November 18, 2013, join the fun!

from → Education

Make Things Do Stuff seek fresh young talent

2013 November 13
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by Caitlin

MTDSlogo

As you may or may not have heard yet, this Autumn, Things Do Stuff Make are looking to recruit a cohort of the freshest young tech talents and content creators from across the UK.

Now in the last week of recruitment (the deadline for applications is Monday 18th November 2013), we are looking to get the word out to as many young people as possible before the end of the week.

Coming together to explore the very frontiers of digital making, we will be supporting this group of 16-24 year olds to discover, document and share the most exciting tech innovations, events & product launches.

All they need to do to apply now is send over:

1) Name
2) Age
3) Location
4) A brief description of why they would like to be involved.

 

The deadline is Monday 18th November 2013

Full details can be found HERE on the Make Things Do Stuff website

 

Please be aware that this opportunity will be primarily carried out online and thus applicants can be from anywhere in the UK.

Furthermore, it can be conducted alongside school or college

from → Competition

The PyLadies come to Dublin – creation of the first PyLadies chapter in Ireland

2013 November 7
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by Vicky Twomey-Lee

It wasn’t that long ago that I was the only female turning up to the monthly Python Ireland meetups, even when I took over organising its events from mid-May 2005. For a few years there were a couple of female Pythonistas that would turn up and disappear, but it did get better, little by little. 2013 was the year I took the lead on encouraging more women to speak and attend PyCon Ireland with our Diversity Programme[1]. With a sold out conference of nearly 320 delegates this year, we had over 30 female delegates, an increase from just over 20 the year before. We invited three female speakers including one as a keynote speaker: an improvement of a total of one in the past three PyCon Irelands.

 

PyLadies dublin

PyLadies Dublin was launched on the second day of the PyCon Ireland’s Sprints, which coincided with Ada Lovelace Day[2][3], a day of celebrating women researching, studying and working in STEM. We had a number of women attending the sprints, and turnout overall was pretty satisfying and the hard work was starting to pay off. PyLadies Dublin is the first PyLadies chapter in Ireland – I encourage women who love to code or curious about Python to come along with their laptops. We get together, learn, create and code together, and hopefully we will contribute something back to Python open-source community in the near future.

 

pylady_geek

PyLadies[4] itself was founded in Los Angeles in April 2011 by seven women. It’s an international mentorship group with a focus on helping more women become active participants and leaders in the Python open-source community. Their mission is to promote, educate and advance a diverse Python community through outreach, education, conferences, events and social gatherings. PyLadies also aims to provide a friendly support network for women and a bridge to the larger Python world.

 

Those who attended the PyCon Ireland female sprints have now joined PyLadies Dublin, and I was very happy to take charge in this initiative. I’m looking forward to our inaugural meetup on Monday 18th November[5].

 

[1] http://python.ie/pycon/2013/diversity/

[2] http://www.siliconrepublic.com/innovation/item/34563-way-to-code-adult-coding/

[3] http://us2.campaign-archive1.com/?u=9d20e0bc6bc0e88a076738c6f&id=6581ce67b3&e=b19397e723

[4] http://www.pyladies.com/

[5] http://www.meetup.com/PyLadiesDublin/events/147478282/

 

vicky LeePyLadies Dublin Founder and Organiser: Vicky Twomey-Lee / Email: dublin@pyladies.com

from → Uncategorized

N Ways To Be A Better Developer

2013 October 25
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by Lorna Jane Mitchell

Lorna's blog imageRecently I had the honour of opening the phpnw conference with a keynote entitled “0x0f Ways To Be A Better Developer”. I co-presented with my good friend and ex-colleague Ivo Jansch, across two rooms with one speaker in each room and video links in both directions – a slightly scary prospect for the presenters, but in the event it turned out to be good fun!

Our aim was to share our collective experiences of seeing the growth of our own careers and those of the people we’ve known and worked with over the years. There are some patterns that really do make a difference and we wanted to give other developers the opportunity to benefit from what we’ve seen rather than having to spend years working it out for themselves! We shared tactics, stories, and hopefully confidence that there are plenty of things that the average developer can do to keep growing and, um, developing.

N WaysThe constraints of a 45 minute talk was frustrating to us, so we decided that we’d also like to try this idea in a different format: a book. The book gives us the freedom to write as much or as little as we please on the various topics we choose – it also means we can both come in, which we do in many chapters. We can also include some of the points that didn’t make it into the talk, new ideas that come to us over time, and whatever else. This of course means that we have no idea how many “ways” will eventually get into the book … and so the title is simply “N Ways” :)

You can find out more about the book, download sample chapters, or even buy it at http://nwaysbook.com.

PHP web servicesLorna Jane Mitchell is a web development consultant and trainer from Leeds in the UK, specialising in open source technologies, data-related problems, and APIs. She is also an open source project lead, regular conference speaker, prolific blogger, and author of PHP Web Services, published May 2013 by O’Reilly.

from → Conferences

Ada Lovelace Day – 15th October

2013 October 15
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by Josette Garcia

Who is Ada Lovelace?

ada1Born in 1815, Ada Lovelace was the daughter of the well-known poet Lord Byron. She studied mathematics at the University of London with Charles Babbage, whose analytical engines were the precursors of the modern computer. Ada is known as a mathematician and computer pioneer, she created the concept of an operating system. She also gave her name to the Ada Programming Language.

STEM – Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics

Ada Lovelace Day is not just about Ada, it is also for raising the profile and achievements of women in STEM, past and present. I just read in the Guardian an article by Suw Charman-Anderson which gives information on Ada Lovelace Day Live! and much more –

Our flagship event, Ada Lovelace Day Live! – a nerd cabaret featuring talks, science demonstrations, comedy and song – is a cross-discipline celebration of women in STEM, and will be held at Imperial College London from 6pm, 15 October. Performers include science communicator and demo designer Fran Scott, bioengineer Professor Molly Stevens, Chi Onwurah MP, Shadow Cabinet Office Minister with responsibility for cybersecurity, and technologist and comedy writer Leila Johnston, amongst others.

There will also be 40 independently organised grassroots events across Europe, North and South America, including several Wikipedia edit-a-thons that aim to increase the number of articles in the online encyclopaedia about women in STEM. There are also many other events, including talks, pub meet-ups, conferences and exhibitions covering the work of a plethora of women, from paleontologists to musicians to artists and sewing machine pioneers.

Why am I troubled by Ada Lovelace Day?

I am not having a go at Ada Lovelace Day. I am troubled by our society which somehow stops women performing in what’ s often seen as ‘a man’s world’. We have all heard of:

  • women being heckled as speakers at conferences not because of the content of their talk but because they are women.
  • women being kept in lower positions in a company or paid less.
  • women threatened with rape and murder on Twitter

PHP womenWhat is wrong with our society that we need special women’s day, special women association such as the PHP Women. By doing so, are we playing in the hands of our male counterparts?

from → Events

WebExpo, Prague

2013 October 14
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by Josette Garcia

webexpoThree weeks ago, I ended up in the charming city of Prague for my second WebExpo conference. With over 1000 attendees, WebExpo  is one of the biggest conferences in Eastern Europe taking care of the latest developments in the field. The first 2 days were of course dedicated to workshops and then we had the Conference. It covered the following areas:

Front-End Development                                               Management Software Development

Content Is King Design Process                                   Product Development Service Design

Founder Stories Cross-Channel Design                     Big Data Accessibility

Internet of Things                                                          Creativity, Communication & Marketing

Life Hacking

During the half an hour coffee breaks the attendees could not only network but talk to recruitment agencies as well as to other exhibitors. One also had time to have a massage kindly offered by Mgr. Hana Jelinkova, a very strong lady – never thought my spine could take so much handling but wow! did I feel good afterwards. Also very popular was the LuYu Tea Stand, manned by Tomas Bryl – if you like tea, check their website, it is worth it. Numerous parties were arranged for delegates and speakers:

  • Opening reception – in the 360° rotating bar with silent disco
  • WebExpo Top Gear Party
  • Node5 presents: WebExpo Unleashed – the closing party which included standup comedy and freestyle rap. Android drones and robots were the icing on the  cake!

1379598094_b-0191379598094_b-012When not at work I enjoyed some speakers fun – the organizers arranged for a Segway tour of Prague. I was invited to join in – so I did. I let you guess the outcome. In the picture, you will meet –

James will be talking at the Strata Conference in London next month. If you see him, please remind him of a wonderful couple of hours in Prague. I must add that I was very lucky and stayed with very good friends so cannot recommend an hotel for you but I am sure there are plenty of nice places to stay in Prague.

I forgot to say that this year all the talks were in English, the conference food was excellent, the parties, I am told, were brilliant so why don’t you come next year!

 

from → Events

Let’s start a #techmums revolution!

2013 October 3
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by Sue Black

Greetings

techmums-white-shadow

 

 

 

I spoke at the UN Broadband conference in New York a few weeks ago about women and technology and how important technology and education are for the empowerment of women. Neelie Kroes (@neelieKroesEU) the EU Commission spoke there too saying

“Technology can be a game changer for women…..technology is a huge boost for our economies, if we are missing women we are missing out….billion Euros in Europe alone.”

sue phd ceremonyFrom a personal perspective education and technology changed my, and my children’s lives for the better. You may know that 25 years ago I was a single parent with 3 kids living in poverty. I studied maths at college, took a CS degree and software engineering PhD and became a computer science academic.

Getting an education and understanding tech and all its opportunities has dramatically improved not only my, but also my children’s life chances. They have happy, accomplished and successful lives.

We need to give more women the chance to see what opportunities there are in tech. To give them the confidence and understanding that enables them to create a better life for themselves and their families. This is not only good for them, but also in the long run good for the economy.

I’ve recently been working on trying to make this happen. I created #techmums a program of 5 * 2 hour immersive hands on workshops in app design, web design, online security, social media and Python programming with Raspberry Pi. We take mums who are in their own words “afraid of the keyboard” and help them to become tech savvy. e-Skills UK have accredited the #techmums program.

We have run an extremely successful pilot in the UK’s poorest borough: Tower Hamlets, the average female life expectancy there is the lowest in the country at 54. That’s just 3 years older than me.

We have made an obvious difference to our first cohort of #techmums’ lives, Dr Lela Koulouri from Brunel University carried out an investigation throughout the program into the #techmums self esteem, confidence and attitude towards technology. The findings were that not only did the #techmums confidence in and around technology grow, but also their general self esteem.

In the next few months we are going to be running #techmums across secondary schools in Tower Hamlets, and making plans to scale it up and roll it out across the UK.

We are currently looking for funding for the Tower Hamlets roll out and for volunteers, mums and schools across the UK to sign up so that we can gauge interest in a national roll out.

It would be great to have your help and support. There are currently four ways that you can help us:

1.  By donating to our Indiegogo campaign Let’s start a #techmums revolution watch the video and see what the mums say about how it has changed them.

 

 

2.  By signing up as a volunteer, mum or school.

3.  By spreading the word to others that you think may be interested in helping us by email, or Twitter @SavvyTechmums

“I’m helping to start a #techmums revolution with @savvytechmums http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/let-s-start-a-techmums-revolution”

or Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/techmums

4. By offering us support, advice, contacts and/or advocacy so that we can make sure our campaign is successful. Who could you connect us to?

Changing mums lives changes not only their life for the better but the lives of those around them. This African saying sums up what we are all about:

“Educate a man and you educate one person, educate a woman and you educate a nation”

Let’s educate *our* nation :))

Thank you very much for your time. I look forward to hearing from you.

Interested? Read more here.

Sue

Sue BlackDr Sue Black, founder and CEO, Savvify “Engage Enlighten Inspire”

 

from → Education, Workshops/Tutorials

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