typingincolor.com

I use FastScripts to run this, and it creates a Things task for each message you’ve selected in Outlook.

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23

tell application "Microsoft Outlook"
	using terms from application "Microsoft Outlook"
		-- get the currently selected message or messages
		set selectedMessages to current messages
 
		-- if there are no messages selected, warn the user and then quit
		if selectedMessages is {} then
			display dialog "Please select a message first and then run this script." with icon 1
			return
		end if
 
		repeat with theMessage in selectedMessages
			set theSubject to subject of theMessage
			set theContent to plain text content of theMessage
 
			tell application "Things"
				set newToDo to make new to do with properties {name:theSubject}
				set tag names of newToDo to "email"
				set notes of newToDo to theContent
			end tell
		end repeat
	end using terms from
end tell

My second applescript for alfred. This time it creates a things task.

1
2
3
4
5
6
7

on alfred_script(q)
	set theSubject to q
	tell application "Things"
		set newToDo to make new to do with properties {name:theSubject}
		set tag names of newToDo to "alfred"
	end tell
end alfred_script

I use Alfred (http://www.alfredapp.com/) to speed things up on my mac and it is a brilliant bit of software. I pay for the powerpack and have written a little bit of applescript to allow me to ssh to a server from the launcher.

I have it set up to so that “ssh server username” will connect to server as username. If you don’t put it a username it will default to “default”.

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24

on alfred_script(q)
	set tmp to splitString(q, " ")
 
	set server to item 1 of tmp
 
	if length of tmp is 2 then set login to item 2 of tmp
	if length of tmp is 1 then set login to "default"
 
	set command to "ssh " & server & " -l " & login
 
	tell application "Terminal"
		do script command
	end tell
end alfred_script
 
to splitString(aString, delimiter)
	set retVal to {}
	set prevDelimiter to AppleScript's text item delimiters
	log delimiter
	set AppleScript's text item delimiters to {delimiter}
	set retVal to every text item of aString
	set AppleScript's text item delimiters to prevDelimiter
	return retVal
end splitString

So it’s been more or less three years (actually 17th Nov) since I joined the Hut Group, and it’s not going to be all that long until I’ve been here longer than I was at IBM (although still a long way to go to overtake Atos). I’d thought I’d take this opportunity to look back over the last three years and reflect upon what I’ve learnt.

I joined the Hut Group because I was getting bored at Atos Origin. I was working on a project for a large government department and although some of the things we were doing were interesting, it felt like I was destined to work on the project for the long term. A former colleague, Tim, was at the Hut at Head of IT and he asked me to come over and help him sort things out. I turned down the initial offer, but eventually decided to take the opportunity. The main reasons were that I knew Tim, and I wanted to try my hand at web development.

I joined the Hut Group as a Senior Developer and worked on mostly back-end projects. I integrated with a flowers supplier (not a great success), wrote a backup payment system and made lots and lots of changes to our back office system. I also made a good few changes to the website, including replacing the password reminder system.

At Atos Origin I had a number of roles as a configuration manager and it seemed natural that I would attempt to sort things out in this area at the Hut as well. We use subversion and I used to police the developers to make sure that they were using it correctly.

During all of this the development team grew pretty quickly. We I started we had 10 people in the IT department, including the TA, Head of IT and support team. A new CTO joined us, and we went on a recruitment drive that hasn’t really stopped.

As the team got bigger I moved into a TA role so that we could provide some technical leadership to the developers. I worked alongside the Chief Technical Architect (James) and helped get some pretty major changes to the platform in. I also spent a lot of time improving our monitoring so we could tell when the platform was having problems.

About 2 years ago Tim decided to take a new role, so I became the Development Manager and later the Head of Development. Our current CIO (Gareth) joined shortly afterwards and under his leadership we started to introduce agile development.

Our original process for getting work into the team was for a business stakeholder to fill in a work request form which one of the team would look at and estimate the effort involve. We would group a few of these together and form a project to be delivered. This was the theory in any case. What actually happened is that the work request forms sat in one of several large folders on my desk and pretty much got ignored. What the team actually worked on was whatever a few senior people in the group decided was important. The process wasn’t very transparent and we had a tendency to start work and not finish it. Things were not great, and nobody was satisfied with performance of the team.

The first thing we did to more towards an agile methodology was to get control of the work coming in to the team. I went round all the business to talk to them about what work they wanted to be delivered over the next twelve months. These were all written on index cards and James, Gareth and I gave t-shirt size estimates to them all (S, M, L, XL) and fitted them on to a rough plan. We moved away from 15 developers meaning 15 projects on the go, and organised everybody into small teams. We recruited a number of tech leads to lead the teams and they worked with the teams to get the agile practices we want embedded into the team.

Things began to improve pretty quickly, but it became clear that the Tech Leads were struggling to balance the management side of their role with the technical leadership of the team. We already had a business analyst working with us, and he moved into a project management role and we recruited two more PMs. The PMs work closely with the business to understand their requirements and act as Scrum Master for the project teams. They basically make sure that the developers can concentrate on developing and they remove any impediments that stop them.

I think the best change we made was decreasing the number of teams. We ended up with 7 teams with a couple of people in them, and this caused a few problems. There was a limit to who people could pair with, and limited the amount of work a team could do. If anybody was on holiday, work basically stopped until they came back. Worst of all it was difficult to get the team to self organise and engender any sort of team spirit. We cut the number of teams down to 3, each with 6 or 7 people in them. We’ve kept these pretty constant for about six months and they are now very productive. The teams organise themselves (to a certain extent), and we’ve got a good spirit in all of them.

The final change we’ve made is to create a “Rapid Response” team. This team handles all the day-to-day requests that come in to the development team. These range from fixing defects, to delivering new pieces of functionality. We aim for a piece of work delivered by the team in 3 days or less. We manage the work of the team using a kanban board, with the business prioritising all the outstanding requests twice a week. The prioritisation meetings take about 15 minutes and we have some really good discussions about what is important to the business. We’re delivering on average 5 tasks a week and the business like it as they have very clear visibility of what the team is working on now and next. The best thing is that they can see things being delivered.

So what will the future hold? I personally think we will move away from delivering “projects” to delivering features. These will be smaller pieces of work that we can deliver constantly. There will always be projects to deliver, but a lot of what we do is already feature based and a lot of the time we use scrum and sprints to mark time.

The biggest change on the horizon is that we are recruiting a number of test engineers. These will work with the development teams to promote best practice and help us automate our testing process. We’ve done some work in this area, but we have a long way to go. I’m quite excited about some of the things we can do with tools like Cucumber to aid automated acceptance testing.

What about me? It looks like I am going to get more involved on the technology side of things. We have a number of interesting challenges coming up to make the platform scale to support the continued growth of the business. The good thing about the Hut is we can react quickly to new opportunities and making the IT do this is good fun.

At work we use a kanban process to manage our small change requests with the development team. These requests are pretty much a 50:50 split between new features and defects. We have always used about 15% of our resource to do these requests, but have we only really made any progress once we had a dedicated manager (me!) running the process and dedicated developers doing the work [let's face it, it's the developers who made the difference]. The team is known as the BAU team, and the developers work on it for a 2 week stint and everybody gets to have a go. This has good points and bad points and I’m still not sure where I am with this. On the good side, it is a great way to spread knowledge through the wider team as the BAU team work on every part of our systems; but as the developers only work on it for a couple of weeks you don’t really have time to build a team that is self organised and committed to a goal. Having said that, the team have delivered some great pieces of work and I think they have enjoyed the experience overall.

Anyway, the “BAU” name is pretty dull and undersells both the value of the work that the team does and it’s complexity so we’ve decided to rename them the Rapid Response Team. I have even done a logo!

Apologies in advance to our entire Design team and anybody with a modicum of taste for the abomination that am I about to release on the world. I did maths at Uni and I absolutely hated art having realised at an early age that I completely suck at it.

Anyway…

I’ve just read a very interesting article about recruiting software developers in the Guardian, which pretty much mirrors my feelings on the matter. I do a lot of recruitment and have encountered many of the frustrations described.

I’m going to quote from the last paragraph:

To be honest, if someone wrote to me with a nice covering letter and spoke about open source projects that he or she liked, pointed me at a Twitter feed where they were intelligently engaged in the problem domain, and sent me some code that they’d written, they’d be more or less hired at this point. No one wants to see a list of technologies with some random skill level or years experience.

If you’re interested in joining the Hut Group, check out our careers page and get in touch. I can be reached directly via my twitter account @typingincolor.

As a developer of long experience, and a manager more recently: this joke appealed to me

A tourist walked into a pet shop and was looking at the animals on display. While he was there,another customer walked in and said to the shopkeeper, “I’ll have a C monkey please.” The shopkeeper nodded, went over to a cage at the side of the shop and took out a monkey. He fitted a collar and leash, handed to the customer,saying, “That’ll be $5,000.”

The customer paid and walked out with his monkey. Startled,the tourist went over to the shopkeeper and said,”That was a very expensive monkey. Most of them are only a few hundred pounds. Why did it cost so much? “The shopkeeper answered, “Ah,that monkey can program in C – very fast,tight code,no bugs,well worth the money.”

The tourist looked at a monkey in another cage. “Hey,that one’s even more expensive! $10,000! What does it do?”

“Oh,that one’s a C++ monkey; it can manage object-oriented programming,Visual C++, even some Java All the really useful stuff,” said the shopkeeper.

The tourist looked around for a little longer and saw a third monkey in a cage of its own. The price tag around its neck read $50,000.The tourist gasped to the shopkeeper, “That one costs more than all the others put together! What on earth does it do?”

The shopkeeper replied, “Well, I haven’t actually seen it do anything, but it says it’s a project manager”.

 

So another year gone and I have reached the ripe old age of 36. I guess I will have to accept that I am now middle aged. The chances of me playing centre-half for City or becoming a rock god are probably now on the remote side, so what I am going to do for the second half of my life?

The first half has been pretty eventful. I’ve been married for the best part of 14 years to the girl I met at university, and despite what I may say, I don’t regret any of it.

I have two lovely boys who drive me insane but who I wouldn’t be without.

I’ve been pretty successful at work, despite some interesting career choices. I’ve even ended up managing a team of 30, which I am sure will amuse a number of my former colleagues. I’ve worked in Belgium for a year, worked for the UK’s biggest bank, the largest IT company in the world and even the Guernsey Government. I’ve worked with some brilliant people and written some pretty code.

It’s not all been fun. Number 1 son was born four 3 months early, weighing 1lb 9oz. I wouldn’t want to repeat the night he was born, stressful doesn’t begin to cover it. I can only guess how much the NHS spent looking after him, but I am eternally grateful to everybody who did. I find it amazing that he shows absolutely no signs of what he want through.

So the last 35 years have been pretty good on the whole. What to do now?