Achievements this week included: - attending the Build convention in Anaheim - some great thinking and conversations about how events might be rethought in the future - some inspirational stuff around Agile... and how it might apply to marketing activity - not doing the usual conference thing of burning the candle at both ends Next … Continue reading Weeknote 66 – (one tenth of the beast)
Everything in the US is big. The cars. The roads. The servings of food. The conventions. This is the second US convention that I have attended in the past few months, and the scale of them is just colossal. Thousands of people attended hundreds of talks over a few days in buildings that could on … Continue reading TravelBlog Build: The US Convention experience
Attended a great talk this morning given by Aaron Bjork and Peter Provost about Agile development (and what support there is in the new versions of Visual Studio). The talk should be available soon on http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/BUILD/BUILD2011/TOOL-793T, but in the meantime there were some great headlines about core principals of Agile development that are worth sharing. It's … Continue reading Ten points on Agile Development
I'm off this week to attend the Build conference in LA. Whilst I won't be talking much about the conference content (there are far wiser people to do that on my behalf), there may be some reflections over the course of the week as to the experience of a conference at the gates to Disneyland...
I was listening to the Guardian's Tech Podcast this morning, and there was coverage of the new Amazon Kindle device that will be shipping in the US later this year, and next in Europe. From the sounds of it, there is another competitor on the block for the tablet/PC/slate/phone/reader showdown that continues to bounce around … Continue reading Device types and business models
Achievements this week included: - completing the last bits of the performance review process - kicking off two recruitment exercises (more details soon) - monthly project review process sort of completed - quite a bit of blogging for once - the start of planning for Store Wars Next week: five days in Anaheim
I wrote a few weeks ago about what motivates people in general, and software developers in particular, to improve their performance. Since then, I've been reminded about a conversation I had about a similar topic with a recruiter a few years ago. Many organisations provide benefits to their staff that are related to their products … Continue reading The Chalmers/Clarkson Index
There is a way of thinking about how we influence people that distills styles of influence into "push" influence and "pull" influence. Push influence, either through straight assertion or logical argument, tends to be focused on telling people what to do. Although it can have success in the short term, over time consistently pushing people … Continue reading Push me/pull you
I’ve been in my new role now for a little over five months, and am starting to make some sense of what I am here to do. In essence, my team is responsible for making people in the UK technology sector, and in particular those in the world of software development and others in the … Continue reading Social Marketing
There was an exemplary case of chasing totemic numbers on BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme on Monday morning. A political think tank had published a report that outlined ways in which UK police forces were missing opportunities to save tens of millions of pounds annually by getting civilian staff to replace uniformed officers in back … Continue reading Criminal Numbers
