Living with Android 4.* on Samsung S3

The Due to a screen fade issue with my Samsung S7 I recently had the chance to downgrade temporarily to my old Samsung S3.

The first thing that I noticed was how much smaller the old device is, both in terms of the physical device and screen real estate. Welcome to zooming and scrolling! From a development point of view it is all too easy to think of these two devices as the same format but that could be a mistake. It may be good to consider making the main view different for small handsets.

The second thing to hit me which was more profound was the performance, or lack of. I removed every app I didn't absolutely need. It turns out that still wasn't enough. If you are wondering why your older remain relatives or friends are so slow to message back; this is probably why. It is so tempting, as a developer using the latest handset, to think people will upgrade their handsets. Guess again, according to the official Google developer pages a massive 36.3% of android handsets are running KitKat L19 or lower as of January 2017. If you are building a mass market app this simply isn't a demographic that you can afford to ignore.

There are some tech companies who occasionally do downgrade testing for a large set of their employees. Facebook is one noteworthy example.

Many apps just can't run in usable time, by that I mean that they remind me of using a x286 without the Coprocessor. A particularly bad example was the twitter app which crashed every time that the "share content on social" hook was called to find contextual information.

The question remains, does developing for the latest hardware first make sense if you are trying to reach mass appeal or does making your developers start with the end in mind ensure your app will succeed?

Discovering The Beauty of Tuscany in Italy

Italy is without exception my favourite place to visit and my last trip was no exception. There are some really stunning places but my favourite from my last trip was Montepulchano.

The town it's self is small and can easily be walked around in a matter of hours but to really get to know this gem of a spot you have to spend a little more time getting to know your way around.

One definite attraction are the wine cellars of this great old wine growing region.

As well as the beauty of this gorgeous town our accommodation at Residence Fabroni really made the visit special. Ombretta, the manager of the property was probably the most hospitable host you could ask for. The view from the balcony was worth the trip alone.

As well as the Tuscany wine region the trip also included Florence and Verona, the town famous for it's part in Romeo and Juliet. The restaurants definitely seemed to favour eating in couples!

More photos coming soon when I manage to find a USB card reader!

QA for the Customer

Some time ago I had the chance to work wuth a development team which had separate QA resource. The team was working in the standard "over the wall" mentality. Developers do stuff, QA engineers pick it apart and so on.

I heard a phrase which really gave me pause:

"QA is working on behalf of the customer"

This sounds great, the QA engineers really take ownership of thinking about the customer. What does it say about the development team motives? Aren't they thinking about the customer?

In the teams I have helped shape I have always avoided dedicated QA because I suspect it creates an environment where people defer responsibility. On the other hand it might mean that a stretched development team can roll out faster as they can rely on QA to catch the issues. That might sound plausible but in the world of ever accelerating deployment can manual testing really keep up?

Recruiting Full Stack Developer

I recently joined www.parktechnology.com as the CTO.

One of the great pleasures of my role is to start hiring a technology team. The first role we are trying to recruit for is a 'Full Stack Developer'. We will also be hiring for Android and IOS developers too so watch this space.

UPDATE...

We were really lucky to be able to find two really strong candidates who have a wealth of experience. Exciting times!

Blog Draft Ratio: Should We Publish Everything

Recently I have had a proliferation of ideas about blog posts to write. The challenge is knowing which are really interesting to readers. One thought was to publish every draft as it is then let views / votes / comments decide which to refine. Does anyone want this?

Random Damage

One of the hardest things to rationalise are random acts. Today I found someone had pushed my motorbike over. Unfortunately there was quite a bit of damage. I still need to strip down the rear fairing which is cracked,  but the damage already stands at over £350.

With insurance premiums spiralling and excess now nearly half the value of the bike,  maybe it is time to let it go. You just can't keep anything nice.

How to Apply Sales CRM to Job Hunting

After reading a number of books on sales about using technology like Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools to measure and qualify your sales funnel to increase the predictability of leads and opportunities turning into offers and contracts.

By leads I'm talking about people or companies I haven't contacted or worked with.  Once they are qualified then they become opportunities. This seems to be a common distinction made in the sales industry. The terminology seems better suited to sales and marketing but for the sake of speed I'm going to use them here.

Many sales organisations also split the tasks of generating leads and developing them into opportunities. My lead generation activities included:

• Attending conferences and fairs.
• Researching top companies via lists from sites like glassdoor and the guardian top graduate employers lists.
• Through my network trying to identify potential companies.

From these lists of companies the qualification step is quite different from an outbound sales team approach. In a sales team the lead generation hand over happens after the lead generation team has made contact and qualified that the potential customer is in the market to buy. The opportunity team then focuses on 'closing' the deal.

In the job hunting context this looked like researching the companies and identifying whether they are hiring for a good work match. To stretch the metaphor further the HR, talent team or recruiters are the 'gate keepers'. Initial calls would be with HR for example and once it seemed there was a potential there and the discussion was involving the leadership team of the company they were converted to opportunities.

In keeping with the predictable revenue approach I tried to keep track of how many companies I found were in market. For me it was around 20%. This helped me figure out how many companies I needed to research to feed my opportunity funnel.

Using my CRM tool I set up a opportunity funnel with stages for:

1. Introduction Email.
2. Initial Call. 
3. Send CV.
4. On Site Interview(s).
5. Proposal Meeting.
6. Offer Review.
7. Accepted.

This was really helpful as I could prioritise based on likelihood of getting an offer and how far along the process I was. Being able to track the attrition also gave me an idea how many company lead generation / qualifications I needed to do in order to 'fill' my week. The goal being to have 5 - 10 on site interviews per week.

Fix Found for Foundation 5 Syntax error unrecognized expression

If you are using Zurb Foundation 5 and are seeing this error message:

Uncaught Error: Syntax error, unrecognized expression: [data-'Times New Roman'-dropdown]

Then check out this solution from http://jelaniharris.com/2014/fixing-foundation-5s-unrecognized-expression-syntax-error/

Installation Issues of Ubuntu 15.10 and 14.04 on Lenovo X1 Carbon

I recently bought a Lenovo X1 Carbon and had a bit of a 'mare' installing Ubuntu (both 15.10 and 1.04). I had error messages like:

• Unable To Find A Medium Containing A Live File System
• ACPI PPC Probe failed 

And some other issues which aren't possibly related. The bottom line is that it wasn't possible to install ubuntu from USB disk as the live CD medium wasn't found. 

There is an open bug with usb3 disks and I found that if I forced my laptop to treat the ports as USB2 (disable USB3 in the bios) everything worked fine. If you are having this issue and this post helps feel free to tweet me your dmesg issues so I can add them to the list!

Which is the next hot technology for full stack developers?

I am trying to compile a list of technology stacks that full stack developers are using and could in the future become part of a recognised approach like LAMP. Please tweet me your suggestions...

• React / Go / Mongo : MGR 
• React / Node / Mongo: RNM
• Angular / Ruby / Mongo : MRA
• Ruby / Rails / Postgres : RRP

How about layout technologies? The main runners seem to be:

• Foundation
• Bootstrap

Then there is view / control systems like:

• Backbone
• Angular
• Ember

Ansible Destination Not Writable

This is a quick blog post FYI in case you are searching for error messages like:

msg: Destination /etc/mysql/my.cnf not writable

This may be caused by the need to set the sudo flag in any roles/your_role/vars/main.yml files as it seems that they default to sudo : no if you define a main.yml for your vars. While creating the main.yml file for all of the vars your role defines seems to be best practice it isn't intuitive that you need to redefine that this role should use sudo.

---

sudo : yes

Thanks to Patrick Kuti for his tip in this ansible discussion for the solution.

Note too that vars in a role overrides inventory variables. If you want to document the defined variables use roles/role/defaults/main.yml instead.

Links:

• Ansible Variable Precedence Order

The Three Stages of Software Design Evolution

I have had a number of conversations lately with different people on the subject of assessing job candidate competency. This is a really hard thing to do in an interview. One of the main reasons is that the stress of the interview can seriously detract from the candidate performance.

A colleague asked me how I would assess the levels of competency for a developer and after some thought I came up with a few distinctive levels:

JFDI: Hack, Ship, Hope

Now we are talking here about the 'design' element of the process. You can hack code in a well designed component or a poorly designed one. The choices you make on your first attempt will determine whether when you need to change the code whether you can iteratively change it or it has to be replaced.

Startup developer teams often end up building components that are thrown away. This is usually because they didn't fully understand the requirements. This is kind of a special case. Startups are supposed to solve problems for which the answer is not known aren't they? (Well supposedly).

At this level code review may not pick up on the design decisions being made (or lack of design) during individual diffs. 

Ask a Friend

In reality most software developers have discovered Google search by the time they graduate. The even more socially adept may have also discovered the joy of getting help on Quora and StackOverflow. The tricky thing is that once you are in an professional role you often can't reveal too much about what you are working on.

There are a few different activities to look for:

• Searching the internal repos for a working solution (yes code can be re-used).
• Internal forum activity.
• Engaging a more experienced engineer. We all need coffee breaks.
• Finding the coding standard for your team and seeing what the normal design pattern usage is.

Defining Norms

Once a developer has started to get feedback on designs there is a natural tendency to share the decision. This may be as part of a show and tell or a wider presentation. These sorts of activity will drastically improve the efficiency of not only the developer solving the problem but the reset of the team by sparking ideas and understanding.

The nirvana of defining 'the way we work' is upon us. One of the most debilitating challenges facing any developer sitting at their keyboard:

The past, like the future, is indefinite and exists only as a spectrum of possibilities. - Stephen Hawking

There can at times simply be too many possible ways to solve a problem. Design patterns can help but they some times contradict each other. In order to be able to 'get things done' some times the best thing can be to have a standard way which means you can get started then discover along the way the problems you still don't know about. This idea works well with the concept of tracer code.

Defining Exceptions

Clearly the goal of defining a norm like how should a problem be solved should include the counter cases. If the goal of defining ways of working the challenge here is to understand where a library, tool or process doesn't apply.

How many times have you seen hadoop map reduce used to solve problems exactly matching the documented counter cases? 

Some framework take this "when you have a hammer everything looks like a nail" philosophy to the limit. 

In a startup context you can also find that you come full circle and use the wrong tool simply because you have to get something done. The reversibility design pattern is your friend. Apply liberally. 

Sales University

In a previous post I mentioned the sales training from Rod Sloane which I attended at Google campus. My goal was to brush up on my sales skills to support a few projects I am working on at the moment.

In addition to finding some seminars and networking groups I also built myself a reading list of some of the top rated sales books available on Kindle. For each one I downloaded the sample and bought it if I was convinced it was worth a read. I will update the list as I get through them.

Coffees for closers

A really useful read for those who haven't, like me, had any formal sales training. It gives you a lot of tools and examples to help you think about what you could have done differently in retrospect.

Predictable Revenue

I really like how this book outlines a number of funnel steps and helps you to focus on tracking conversion rates so that you can predict sales volumes. The idea is that if you know the conversion rate of all of the steps in your sales funnel then you can estimate team size required for your sales target. I ended up using the sales funnel stages that are defined in this book to create the opportunity states in my CRM. Great stuff

To Be Read (Not all directly sales)

- The DIY manual of copy writing that really packs a punch
- Delivered: the no nonsense guide to email marketing
- 79 network marketing tips for fast track success
- Sell them the pen
- The little fish guide to marketing
- Bootstrap marketing: 101 tips for marketing on a budget

Other Events

https://london.techhub.com/events/startup-sales-bootcamp-7-steps-to-sell-without

Web Summit 2015 with Upgrade Digital

In November this year I was lucky enough to be able to attend Web Summit to promote Upgrade Digital 

The web summit venue is truly vast. Our stand, which we only had for one of the three days was near the main stage so we had fantastic footfall but very little engagement sadly.

Web summit has become famous due to Uber raising so much funding during a chat in the pub but it has perhaps gotten too large.

The first night summit was very popular and there were a lot of great conversations but what became apparent was that there were a very large number of startup companies attending.

If you go to Dublin I strongly recommend going for a whisky tasting session at the temple bar. The bar staff are very knowledgeable and extremely friendly.

Oh, and there are some great places for live music too, whether you are looking for traditional folk or more rock covers.

SSL Test Certificate Bleed

Many of the people I have worked with will know of my distaste for self signed SSL certificates in test environments. Once you have built a tool to generate and distribute these 'cruft' flakes they invariably spread. The worst case scenario is if these certs end up in your production environment. The real question to ask is will developers take the path of least resistance and skip SSL validation.

I have always advocated using genuine certificates for all build environments. This approach is usually resisted with the vigor of a grad dev defending his favourite language. I don't know why. With a little planning it is easy to use a subdomain, with implementation costs typically in the double digits per year. Usually the argument has more to do with resistance to fixing something that 'works'.

The recent news of symantec accidentally releasing test certificate is a really good counter case. This is one test environment that really should use a self signed cert. The Web needs security and the certificate issuance companies could be the weakest link.

The SIMPLE Guide to Startup Sales from Rod Sloane @campuslondon

Today I was at @campuslondon and just happened to attend an event on sales for startups. The event was held by Rod Sloane. Rod is also offering webinars in November about how to create effective marketing email messaging.

Rod's technique suggests following some steps based on a SIMPLE acronym.

• Speak: take opportunities to present and speak at events. It will help boost your confidence and leads.
• Idea: Articulate your idea in terms of what your prospective customer wants, not necessarily what they need.
• Marketing: Effective marketing should be driving leads which are aligned with your sales strategy.
• Predictable Revenue: Buy it, read, apply, rinse and repeat.
• Listen: Take a course on listening, it is the top skill for sales, when you are cold calling and someone says "if I had £10k to spend I wouldn't spend it on you" ask what they would spend it on.
• Email: Use linked in and tools like SalesLoft t build a list which you use to send personalised emails. If you are sending a lot of emails check out yet another mail merge

Tips: 

* Send emails to SME CEO on Sunday between 5 and 7 pm.

* Start with a simple message, shorter is better like "are you looking for a new website".

* Always follow up on the dates you suggest. Insightly can help.

* It can take 27 approaches to buy a product. Think about sending 8 emails with different content targeting issues and challenges.

* One way to open a sales call is to say "This is a sales call" to see if they want to hang up.

* If in doubt use the one page marketing plan template.

* JFDI

Shopping Trip to Durham

For the last few weekends I have been visiting Durham to do a bit of shopping. It has been a long time since I spent much time in the city other than just passing through. A few things have really changed and I am glad to say that the city seems to have really developed.

In case you don't know, Durham has some beautiful scenery, castles, cathedrals and a lot of fun little cobbled streets, an ancient market and the almost legendary stoicism of the locals trotting around in practically no clothes on a freezing cold winter night.

Lads and lasses of the north, I salute your ability to endure any weather in a T-shirt.

Refactoring Bookable Resource API

One of the key principles of the design of many of the different API platforms I have built recently was to separate the model exposed to users from what is stored. I have and continue to be a huge fan of using Protobuf to model the internal messages consumed in systems. Using POJO classes and Jackson Json serialisation provides a great choice for the seialisation too.

Irrespective of the tech used separating these two layers has been a mandatory feature of systems I have built for a while. The key thing is creating flexibility of representation while also having a stable storage model.

As part of a redesign of the external API for Upgrade I reviewed the features of the model. I had a shopping list of features I wanted to add. As many times before I started refactoring the representation while rerunning the tests to ensure I didn't break the representation published for the API. I started noticing a few patterns of code that needed cleaning up. These models are after all the oldest code in that project.

Over time the project had been refactored a number of times and this layer of the code had become more encapsulated. The up shot of this is that new abstractions introduced in other places had not been applied in these old objects. The changes all had the same basic pattern:

"Don't mix layers of abstraction"

When the project first started many of the messy features had been cleaned up. While awesome tools like IntelliJ will find some common refactoring this was a more subtle layering refactoring.

To try and avoid this again I came up with a new rule for these kinds of classes where if I find myself writing helpers, statics etc. I will add a TODO to review later. This sort of problem can often occur earlier in a project especially when the general structure and repeted functions haven't been identified yet.

Remember to watch out for the mixed layers of abstraction as a clue. Happy coding.

Heading Back to the UK After Four Months

After four months away with occasional trips back I am heading home to the UK tomorrow. In this stint I have been away for over 50 days. I didn't really plan to be away for so long and it has presented some problems like I had to upgrade my travel insurance as it stopped at 45 days.

Due to the fever I had over the last week or so I haven't had the opportunity to do many of the things I needed to before heading back like arranging somewhere to live. Small point I know :-)

The thing about breaking a leg that you don't realise at first is that you are going to have to rely on others for practically everything. The main challenge is shopping which presents a real problems when on crutches. In the UK there are food delivery companies but depending how / where they deposit the food it could take hours to put it all away.

When I said I was in need of a break I didn't mean a bone!

Unfortunately a couple of days into my second week in Mauritius I broke my right leg kite surfing. I had said in my previous post that I was "much in need of a break": was this the god of grammar getting back at me or something?!

The problem was that as you can kind of see the bones weren't really lined up so I needed surgery. I realise that for many people surgery is just another hobby, especially if you are seeking the costly help of 'plastic' surgeons.

For me the experience was that I was alone in a fairly stressful hospital situation (we aren't talking about the UK here) and some fairly questionable bed side manners.

"Don't worry, you aren't leaving anyone behind so it doesn't matter if something happens" - says the nurse....

"It matters to me!" I say back.

 Unfortunately the surgery took longer than expected and the effects of the (insert name of drug related to morphine) were quite severe. I am still not sure if I hallucinated waking up with no underwear. I asked the nurses later but no-one had any idea what I was talking about. I also picked up some good bruises it seems, again no idea why and no information to explain it.

Other things I still don't know include how much the operation cost as I was anaesthetised before the surgeon arrived; I assume my insurance company knows :-/ I am always concerned about the way these kinds of companies write blank cheques as I have had a number of bad experiences with insurance companies trying to recover loses in the past.

The extreme beauty of Mauritius and the kind nature of the locals go a long way to making you feel better but this is still a pain; just about two thirds of my stay I was about to spend on crutches but it was about to get a little worse!

 Post operation I had four days in hospital being prodded in what I assume were the normal ways. The private hospitals here are allegedly far better than the public ones and certainly mine had a sea view and beach front balcony!

As a western visitor it is easy to appreciate the huge difference in experience, with a minimum wage of around $0.50USD per hour it is easy to see why. I heard many stories from nurses in the hospital of their, often very different experience of accidents. The same theme kept coming up, families would take people out of hospital as soon as they were allowed to in many cases. Healthcare is expensive and seems to be charged by the hour.

After leaving the hospital I had a very high fever, I think caused by a stomach bug. After 9 days on a mix of Oroken, Voltarene and Rabezol I just couldn't take normal food. My fever went over 38,5'C and I nearly went back to hospital. I decided on the great advice of a friend to move to a spa resort where at the very least I could get room service and basic food that would hopefully not bother my stomach so much.

The staff at the Hilton Mauritius were really some of the best I have ever stayed with, I would like to say a special thanks to Shyma for keeping an eye on me! It was money very well spent indeed and I was soon feeling nearly normal again. Normal that is for someone with a broken leg and the associated issues.

With two days to go I am now really looking forward to being back in the UK. I can't think of anywhere else in the world I would rather call home.

The usual question I am asked is 'how long will it take to heal' and the best guess I have heard so far is 12 week if the bone sets correctly, during which time I can't put any weight on the foot. After that there is more surgery to remove the hardware, then another 4-6 weeks for the bone to heal from all of the 5 holes in my fibia and tibia which will need to heal in order to strengthen the bone before I can carry out basic tasks like walking again. I'm guessing that 20 weeks means a lot of physiotherapy but I have no idea how much is offered on the NHS.

My final check up went well and I had the staples removed, 25 of them in the end! Removing the staples seemed to cause a bit of bleeding but that was all, there wasn't much pain at all thankfully.